A minute of silence For Everyone? If you are still shaken by the horrifying scenes of September 11, please observe a moment of silence for the 5,000 civilian lives lost in the New York, Washington, DC and Pennsylvania attacks. While we're at it, let's have 13 minutes of silence for the 130,000 Iraqi civilians killed in 1991 by order of President Bush Sr. Take another moment to remember how Americans celebrated and cheered in the streets. Now another 20 minutes of silence for the 200,000 Iranians killed by Iraqi soldiers using weapons and money provided to young Saddam Hussein by the American government before the great eagle turned all its power against Iraq. Another 15 minutes of silence for the Russians and 150,000 Afghan civilians killed by troops supported and trained by the CIA. Plus 10 minutes of silence for 100,000 Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Atomic bombs dropped by the USA. We've just kept quiet for one hour: one minute for the Americans killed in NY, DC, and Pennsylvania, 59 minutes for their victims throughout the world. If you are still in awe, let's have another hour of silence for all those killed in Vietnam, which is not something Americans like to admit. Or for the massacre in Panama in 1989, where American troops attacked poor villagers, leaving 20,000 Panamanians homeless and thousands deader. Or for the millions of children who have died because of the USA embargoes on Iraq and Cuba. Or the hundreds of thousands brutally murdered throughout the world by USA-sponsored civil wars and coups detach (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador to name a few). Maybe, and although the memory of Americans claims otherwise, someone may remember the USA attack on Baghdad where 18,000 civilians were killed. Did someone see it on CNN? Was justice ever served? Or was there even any retaliation? We hope that Americans finally begin to understand their vulnerability and the cowardly attacks and other tragedies that they have caused around the world. The dead in other places hurt as much as the dead of the Towers, even more!
Well if the U.S. didn't give a damn about lives, other than Americans why didn't we just carpet bomb Iraq with B-52's instead of spending millions in precision weapons to TRY to limit the deaths of civilians There is something to be learned in that email however... And that the U.S. should do it's best to keep it's nose out of conflicts it doesn't belong in There are no excuses for Vietnam other than American arrogance...
Lets have a day of silence from the anti-American lobby to celebrate the prevention of the Soviet war machine rolling over the globe in one big Marxist holocaust, to remember to place responsibilities where they should be at the feet of Castro and Hussein and Breschnev among others. Lets have moment of silence from the overexaggerated hatin inspired statistics, and then lets have a moment of silence for those unfortunates caught in the middle of the battles of larger powers.
Azadre, it's not so much that you read stuff like this that bothers me. It's that you take it to heart and feel like it's worth sharing. 1) Document that number, please. I have never heard that figure and find it not remotely credible. 2) Please document George Bush ordering the killing of any Iraqi citizens. 3) Please, help me remember Americans celebrating in the streets after the Gulf War. I was alive back then, and I wasn't five years old like some posters, and I don't remember cheering masses in the streets. I'm going to remind you what we were there for, since you are way too young to remember and evidently are willing to latch onto the first piece of anti-American propaganda that comes along as way of explanation. Every Kuwaiti I spoke to had had members of his or her family beaten, killed, or simply taken away. The hospital morgues wer filled with the remains of tortured Kuwaitis, many unidentifiable. Every cemetery had a swath of new graves, mostly filled with men, the birth dates on the tombstones painfully contemporary and the death dates beginning August 2nd, 1990. I visited a mass grave where two-hundred-some Kuwaitis were interred and these were only the bodies that family members had been able to retrieve and bury by stealth. In another cemetery I found a man tending the graves of his uncle and his uncle's son-in-law. Each tomb had an improvised wooden marker and a bottle stuck neck-down into the dirt with a verse of the Koran rolled inside. The man stood between the bare-earth mounds with his hands at his sides and spoke very quietly. His expression was of enormous, almost hysterical resignation, a kind of smile of grief. He said his uncle's body had burns from a clothes iron and from cigarettes. There were marks of electrical wires. His fingers had been chopped off. His eyes gouged out. Finally he had been shot in the head. The son-in-law had been tortured with an electric drill, then scalped, then shot in each eye. "They were taken away on January 17th," said the man in the cemetery. That was the day the air war began. "The bodies were left at hospitals on January 19th," he said. "These people were not resistance." He paused and then said in the same quiet voice, "Iraqi occupying soldiers shoud be given back to the Kuwaiti people." --P.J. O'Rourke, Give War A Chance, 1992.
I wish Saddam Hussain, Adolf Hitler, Slobadon Melosavic, Benito Mussolini, Hirohito and all the other fascists whom have ruthlessely killed thousands of people shared the same sentiment. Unfortunately the email conveniently ignored the many, many human atrocities caused by other states over the centuries that were not caused by the "White Devil". But again the email's Anti-American persuasion fails to detail the good America has done. (humanitarian missions, libertion of people, nation building etc.) Its offensive the way 9-11 was used as a tool to get over the Anti-American message. Reminds me of the Saudi prince who came over to visit the WTC site after the disaster that donated a million dollars. Later that day his publicist released a statement blaming American policy for the tragedy. What a joke.
1) Document that number, please. I have never heard that figure and find it not remotely credible. I was curious about this and hunted around and this is the best I found. I don't know how accurate it is, as the article is a war crimes article: http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans22.html <I>Then U.S. Navy Secretary John Lehman estimated that 200,000 Iraqis died in the Gulf War, but many more have died since. UNICEF estimates that well over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S-led sanctions regime, in place for the last decade. Some 500,000 children have died, and an estimated 4,000 die from various preventable, sanctions-related diseases, every month, says the U.N. agency. </I> Here's another - also a negative article, though: http://www.change-links.org/KILLINGCIVILIANS.htm <I>When U.S. troops invaded Panama in December 1989, the USA's major media and policymakers in Washington ignored the hundreds of civilians who died in the assault. Scarcely more than a year later, during the Gulf War, most of the people killed by Uncle Sam were civilians and frantically retreating soldiers. Pentagon officials quietly estimated that 200,000 Iraqis had died in six weeks. During the past decade, damage to Iraq's civilian infrastructure and ongoing sanctions have cost the lives of at least several hundred thousand children. </I>
Major, do you really take that site seriously...? Did you bother poking around a little bit to see their interesting takes on international politics?
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/facts/gulfwar/ Per that link, "According to Baghdad, civilian casualties numbered more than 35,000."
BK, innocent question, the total number aside, who is responsible for the loss of these innocent lives?? Smeg
can you explain to me your logic, cause by that logic and my view of History you could then say past American actions in the past were then responsible for 911
My logic is that Saddam Hussein ordered the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The United Nations passed a resolution ordering Iraq out of Kuwait and authorizing the use of force to eject them if they remained in occupation past January 15th, 1991. James Baker met with Iraqi representative shortly before January 15th; Iraq refused to leave Kuwait. In removing the Iraqi occupying army and destroying Iraq's ability to make war, coalition forces inadvertently killed Iraqi civilians. You want to really sit there and tell me you think that's comparable to 9/11?
no i didn't say it was comparable i said without any explanation of your response it could be viewed that way
Seriously, mourn for the Russian invaders of Afghanastan? OK, I do mourn them, but only in the sense that most that died were probably just kids who had little to do with the whole thing, other than having to die for their stupid country's pointless flexing. But the implication from this sentence goes way beyond that. Lol, Hayes, that is an interesting phrase - Marxist holocaust. Marx wasn't even a violent revolutionary as he felt that socialism would be the inevitable evolution of history without violent uprising. It, then, is really off to turn around and pretend as if he or his thought had something to do with Stalin's militarism. In any event, there was never a Soviet war machine that was capable, wanting, or going to "roll over the globe" anyway. Remember, they couldn't even conquer Afghanastan.
BK, you are wrong. You are very wrong. Azadre is correct. I care much more about non-Americans losing their lives than Americans losing their lives. No wait... I don't care at all. The reason I'm pissed about 9/11 is because Americans were killed in America. Americans like me. I don't like that. I think thats crap. And I think each American life lost is as important to me as 3 billion non American lives. Thats my opinion, and I'm sticking to it. So deal with it. If we have to kill the rest of the world to make the world safe, so be it. I don't want to die.
Major, do you really take that site seriously...? Did you bother poking around a little bit to see their interesting takes on international politics? Like I said, I don't know anything about the accuracy of the claims. However, they are persented as "factual" claims - they should be independently verifable if true. One is a UNICEF number, the other is a US Secretary of the Navy number.
obl's original and only consistent demand is for us to leave the land of mecca. That's all. Nothing else. BTW, I was stunned to hear about how the Australians treated the Japanese prisoners of war. Just heard it the other day for the first time. Hey, didn't Australians fight in 'Nam. Well I'll be. Oh, and how's ya'lls history with the aboriginies?
