An open letter to Terrorists

Craig, even though I'm Canadian this tradgedy has certainly effected me. I drove by the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa yesterday; I was overwhelmed with the notes, flowers, etc. adorning the fence around the embassy. I travel extensively in the U.S. and have always enjoyed my time in your country. Throughout my 20-year career in semiconductors I've ended up with quite a few American friends, from Raleigh to San Diego and all points inbetween. I stumbled across this, and thought it really captured the spirit of the people. Don't let the bastards get you down....and yes, payback is a bitch. ATB, Jeff

right on Jeff, well put. That being said, once the anger is contained and some time is taken to think, we must realize that we don't understand our middle east and far east advesaries either. The terrorists are just an unrational responce to the frustrations that a lot of people may have with us. We should take some time to see things from other's point of view, as alien as it may be. If we aviod making the masses of the word angry through ignorant actions they will see the good in america and terrorists will lose their support. I initially felt that kicking some arab butt was the order of the day. Now I personally fear a war with the islamic nation, as much as i think they deserve it, not because i think we would loose rather because of the potential for an infinite stream of terroist actions in this country. We can't kill them all. The only way to completely prevent terrosim in this country is to sacrifice the freedoms that make it such a great place. If we do that they have won. A friend of mine had an interesting idea....send them food. That would mess with their minds. peace

HOME OF THE FREE AND THE BRAVE!

It would be truly sad for this to turn into WW3.

It very well may. And if it does so be it.

We have tolerated other countries policies of hating us. People who think we are Satan. People who burn our flag. People who are working hard to develop biological and nuclear weapons.

All it takes is for a country who hates us to develop or obtain a nuclear device. They smuggle the device into the US. Detonate it in a major city. What then folks? What do we do? What sort of investigation will there be? Not much evidence is left after a nuclear explosion. There will be no way of telling who did it to us. With no evidence, we will be in quite a delimna. A biological attack would yield more evidence... but could be potentially more devistating to human life.

All I have to say is that I am really scared. At least during the Cold War, we did not have USSR spies doing suicide bombing missions on us. We knew who the enemy was and how they would attack. And Russia had some very cool and sane leaders. It really never occurred to us that they would smuggle in a nuclear device. We seemd to live by a Treaty called the Geneva Convention which layed out some sort of rules of war.

Today, we are dealing with people who will suicide themselves for their cause. This takes total conviction. They hate the US so much (and are brainwashed by their religion) that they will suicide themselves to hurt us. If they are willing to do this on such a grand scale like we saw last week, I think the US is justified in going to war with any country that effectively hates us and/or harbors/supports terrorists. If we wait for these countries/organizations to develop weapons of mass destruction, we will all perish in WW3.

Consider again... Washington gets nuked. What do we do? Do we then nuke/goto war with these countries? What do we do?
Do we cave in to whatever demands these terrorist want?

Folks, the only reason Israel has not gone on a full all out war with these guys is that it is a very small country and to decisively win it would have to use nuclear devices. And where would that get them? They would be nuking their neighbors.

We on the other hand, have the capability to fight a two front war. Given the choice of having say 5+ million innocent Americans die in a nuclear attack by terrorist, and say 200,000+ of our trained military personel die in a war to eliminate countries that support terrorists and {and to wipe out} their nuclear capabilities... I think the choice is clear.

If there is no conventional war now... Our future may hold a vast nuclear one ahead. One that may kill us all. Do we want to take this chance?

I give you one last scenario. Suppose a country like Iraq does develop a nuclear device. And we know they are working on it. Iraq then sends a picture and detailed schematics of the bomb to the Pentagon with some demands. What do we do? Countries that hate us and do not participate in the Geneva Convention, should be reguarded as terrorists states. We cannot put up with this madness.

I hate to be negative. I wish we could develop a foreign policy that could get every country to like us. But some terrorists just killed over 5,000 innocent Americans last week. We have tolerated terrorists suicide bombing our friends in Israel for far too long. They just did it to us on a far grander scale. And it hurts. They achieved their desired goal, and it is quite upsetting.

Nuff said.

Peace (I hope)

Tok

Fellow 'files-
I received this email today (friend of a friend, etc.). No idea about the original source, but it bears reading and thinking about.

Dear Friends,
The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.
* Gary T.

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this
atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who
will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not
only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan-a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their
hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away
and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making
common cause with the Taliban-by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill
as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a
holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but
ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary

As I said, just think about this a little. And remember that revenge is dish best served cold.