Why are we so afraid of Islam?

From my experience, people in the middle east in general, most of them really need a better education & standard of living , democracy in their governments, and freedom.
With those problems solved, terrorism will be effectively taken out from the roots.

 

From Sunlion

"Identify "them" please. Because when the official report came out identifying which specific Saudi royals funded and ordered the attack, that part of the report was censored.'

Sunlion, does it matter who them are? I sure as hell don't care who they are. All I know is I don't want them, who ever they were or may be, doing another 9/11 here. Grow up and stop trying to prove how smart your not.

 

Quoted for truth!!

 

(lol) I'm sorry for that mistake. I have erred. I just hope you forgive me otherwise it will take me years of therapy to overcome that tragic mistake.What an egregious error. I promise it will never happen again.Never.

 

Interesting point about more death from cancer on Sept 11th than casualties of the attack on the World Trade Center, between two and three thousand deaths. This, just a few brief months after President Clinton has sat down with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to try and broker a peace settlement.

I guess it is a matter of focus; we loose 50,000 people a year in automotive death, yet we seem to hear a lot more information about our casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

I am reading a lot of material about the CIA practice of waterboarding these days and I wonder how many people have been subject to this sort of interrogation and if they are American citizens?



It seems everybody finds his own boogeyman.



So no; I do not think that it is the raw numbers that cause the outrage and fear. It has more to do with the wanton indifference to human life. The racism. The envy. People dancing in the streets as the World Trade Center collapsed.



The Mid East is such a complex situation and North Americans are so far away; it is hard to paint it in black and white. There are good and bad on both sides. These cultures are very different from ours. Yet threats to The West have been voiced by a minority of people.

 

It's 'Catholicism' and 'Confucianism' there, grammar-Nazi.

 

Sunlion, does it matter who them are? I sure as hell don't care who they are.

You'd better be god DAMN sure who "the terrorists" are if your intent is to hunt 'em down and kill 'em. And just as sure if we don't. We send billions of dollars to the rulers of Saudi Arabia. BILLIONS. And that's the country that attacked us! Did I miss something?

All I know is I don't want them, who ever they were or may be, doing another 9/11 here.

Call me crazy, but I'd rather not burn down entire nations at random, while sending billions of dollars to people who fund killers (however trivial their abilities). Surely you're not saying that we really don't need to know who our enemies are.

By the way, I used to defend Bush right here on this very forum. I thought his attackers were jumping to conclusions with incomplete facts. But there's no doubt that the facts are now in, and they show that the president and his enablers are some really seriously dangerous people.

 

I just saw the movie 'Rendition' and you made a good point. Truth be told I don't think people will ever know about waterboarding, who,where,when and how often did it happen. CIA seems to be busy distroying interrogation tapes.

 

Forgot to mention, the guy in the movie was supposedly a green card holder.

 

eagle86100,



To answer your question....




http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080227/OPINION09/802270302/-1/OPINION21

"Less than five minutes. That's the total amount of time the United States has waterboarded terrorist detainees. How many detainees? Three. Who were these detainees?

One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks" according to the 9/11 Report, and the head of al-Qaida's "military committee." Linked to numerous terror plots, he is believed to have financed the first World Trade Center bombing, helped set up the courier system that resulted in the infamous Bali bombing, and cut off Danny Pearl's head.

A second was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the head of al-Qaida operations in the Persian Gulf. He allegedly played a role in the 2000 millennium terror plots and was the mastermind behind the USS Cole attack that killed 17 Americans.

The third was Abu Zubaydah, said to be Osama bin Laden's top man after Ayman al Zawahri and al-Qaida's chief logistics operative. It is believed that Zubaydah essentially ran al-Qaida's terror camps and recruitment operations.

After he was waterboarded, Zubaydah reportedly offered intelligence officers a treasure trove of critical information. He was waterboarded just six months after the 9/11 attacks and while the anthrax scare was still ongoing.


John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who witnessed the interrogation, told ABC's Brian Ross: "The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

He divulged, according to Kiriakou, "al-Qaida's leadership structure" and identified high-level terrorists the CIA didn't know much, if anything, about. It's been suggested that Zubaydah and al-Nashiri's confessions in turn led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And that's it. Less than five minutes, three awful men, five years ago.

The reason these facts are important is simple. For several years, human rights groups, the media and partisan opponents of the Bush administration and the war on terror have tried to portray the U.S. as a "torture state" that has completely abdicated its decency, its principles and even its soul under the leadership of a president who believes in an ominous-sounding "unitary executive" branch. We've been barreling down a "slippery slope," making America indistinguishable from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.

Yet none of these interrogations were the result of a "rogue" CIA or the mad whims of a "torture presidency." The relevant Democratic congressional leadership for intelligence -- including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Jay Rockefeller and former Sen. Bob Graham -- were briefed on CIA operations more than once. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," Porter Goss, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 to 2004 before becoming CIA director, told the Washington Post. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."


As for the slippery-slope caterwauling, the opposite is true.

The slope toward more torture and abuse has gone up, not down, and it is today more difficult to climb than ever. According to existing law and Justice Department rulings, the practice has been proscribed for several years now -- except, that is, for the thousands of U.S. servicemen who've been subjected to it by the U.S. military as part of their training.

The current debate over legislation to ban waterboarding in all circumstances stinks of political opportunism. Democrats want to claim that Republicans are "pro-torture" if they vote against the legislation.

Others are hoping to advance criminal prosecutions of CIA operatives who used the techniques sparingly and with approval from the White House and Congress, and from both parties.

I don't like waterboarding, and I hope we never use it again. I have respect for those who believe it should be banned in all circumstances. But I do not weep that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spent somewhere between .03 and .06 seconds feeling like he was drowning for every person he allegedly helped murder on 9/11.


Then again, I think it would be horrific if we used that logic to justify waterboarding. It's not a technique that should be used for punishment. Nor do I think that evidence obtained from forced confessions should be used in trial. Those are paving stones on the road to a torture state.

But, given the circumstances at the time, I think the decision to waterboard these three men was right and certainly defensible.

The editors of USA Today disagree. They say that the decision to use waterboarding "was understandable in the frenzied aftermath of the 9/11 and anthrax attacks. What's inexplicable, however, is why, after having several years to assess the matter deliberately, the Bush administration continues to resist efforts to ban waterboarding."

It's only inexplicable if you think we'll never have a "frenzied" moment like that again.

Let's hope."

 

sorry, but muslims simply cannot be held responsible for all the riff raff in the mideast. there's two other major religions there also. but if you are one to believe everything the media tells you, all this is the muslim's fault. during the crusades it was the christians acting like terrorists. i really don't care what goes on in other countries. these "terrorists" don't hate our freedoms. they hate our foreign policies, we cannot nose around in everyone else's buisness forevor and think it won't come back to bite us in the ass eventually.

 

Savage, you red diaper doper baby.

 

How do you know the information is accurate?
How do you know the CIA is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

 

One shouldn't dissapprove of an ideology, but rather those who abuse those ideologies to push their agendas. Islam is a pure religion, and it was created to serve as another set of guidelines in addition to those that already existed. It was an attempt to bring order to the world. But like everything else, single people who value their egos above all else have corrupted what was meant to be enlightening.

 

How do you know the information is inaccurate?

How do you know the CIA is telling lies, falsehoods, and complete fabrications?



You don't know, but you choose to assume it anyway regardless. For all you know, the official story is completely accurate...but you'll continue to propagate your version of reality as the truth rather than dig harder for the truth.

Are you familiar with the concept of "burden of proof"? Until someone comes forward and says they were waterboarded (and believe me everyone in Guantanamo Bay has the world's ear anytime they want it), you've got absolutely nothing to go on.


Look man, I'm not saying the government never lies. I'm not saying they haven't lied countless times in the past...


But you're saying that 100% of what they say is lies, and that's just as ludicrous as saying they never lie.




Oh and Rat, you're a chemtrail-fearing tinfoil hat-wearing baby.

 

Yeah, we should just mind our own business and let the world duke it out. I guess we should have stayed out of WW1. If we did that, Europe would be talking German and the Middle East would still be part of the Ottoman Empire. but we screwed up and stuck our noses in there and liberated the world. And then we screwed up again when we went into WW2. Damm, again we kept Europe from being greater Germany and if Germany had honored their treaty with Russia, Russia would have ruled that part of the world but we stuck our noses in that too and liberated the world. We keep sticking our noses everywhere. Korean War, Vietnam, 1st Gulf War, etc. We just never learn.
The problem I have with us sticking our noses in is that the world seems to forget how much they owe the freedoms they now have to the USA. Such ungrateful bastards. When WW3 comes, lets just sit by, watch millions or maybe billions of people die and not do anything about it. Then when it is all over, we can say, we helped you twice and you did not appreciate it so how do you feel now? By the way, what new language is that you are speaking? Oh, you HAVE to speak it now or die? Gee, thats too bad but we didn't stick our noses in this time. Aren't you happy about that?

They don't hate our freedoms? What a bunch of crap. Let me see, I didn't see the Taliban or Al Queda letting women vote or go to school or being treated as a equal or allow dissent, etc. Are those not some of our freedoms? They don't like us or any western country sticking their noses in because they don't want to give those freedoms or want the people they terrorize to know about those freedoms. What an idealistic view which is so untrue.

I personally can speak about this much more than you ever will since I spent from 2004 to 2006 in Iraq, dubai, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

 

You're welcome to go back over there and play hero, you know.

 

SunLionYou're welcome to go back over there and play here, you know.



Gee, what ever could he mean? hmmmmmmmmmm let me think.

 

WW3? Who is going to start the war? Why always have to fight. It sounds to me like you think war is society's savior.
"What if they started a war and nobody came?"

 

just because you were over there acting like a bullet sponge hardly means you know everything about the situation over there. you seem to be spitting almost the same crap as mike savage does. what good has interfering with everyone else's buisness while ignoring our buisness here at home done us? nothing, that's what. while we go out and fight everyone else's battles we lose here at home. it's not idealism, you'd hate another country too if they had such a hard on for planting their military bases on your soil and installing their puppet regimes as your government. if these veil wearing women are dumb enough to let some stone aged mentality men enslave them and keep them in the dark ages oh well. it's not our problem. our problems are here at home, not overseas. how can we even think about stopping terrorism overseas if we have open and porous borders and allow whoever wants to come over to come over here?