9/11 Anniversary..will there ever be justice?

Unanswered barbarity invites more barbarity.

One major reason the US has not been attacked again since 9/11 is that time we did not shrug our shoulders (as we basically did with earlier attacks on the USS Cole and embassies in Africa) and say, oh well, ONLY 3,000 dead. We reacted in a manner I think we can safely say is daunting to people who would like to try it again. The latter have since contented themselves with blowing up subways in London and trains in Madrid and banks in Turkey.

And whether a response is "commensurate" or not has absolutely no relevance. In today's Newspeak, "commensurate" basically means "casualties acceptable to the terrorist." What has relevance is, Will it be effective?

I"m kinda wondering where you came up those statistics. I did a Wikipedia search and found these numbers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#U.S._armed_forces

With my initial Google search using "Irag War" as search words I noticed quite a number of sites with names such as vets against the war, peace now, etc. I avoided those sites for the very simple reason that it's obvious any statistics provided would likely be skewed to that's sites point of view...........I think unbiased stats are much more valuable when quoting facts. I know there's always going to be disputes over exact numbers but the Wikipedia would likely have more unbias stats than a site with an agenda.

But, be that as it may, my belief is that as long as you view terrorists as mere criminals that police need to find you are setting yourself up for a failure. The terrorists and their groups are more than criminals.......they are aggressors against the free world and everything we stand for. If they were citizens of an established country with some sort of legitamacy I don't think you would call them criminals. It's a war. A war requires a different approach to resolve than the hunting down of a criminal (or group of criminals). Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) we have no experience in a war with the aggressors having no home base that we can bring pressure on to help defeat them. If Afganistan had, as a country, attacked us on 9/11 then the concept of "war" would be much easier to comprehend. Have no doubt we are at war with an enemy that has no conscious and will murder anyone, anywhere who gets in their way. Their stated goal is the rid the entire world of what they consider infidels..........and if you are not a true believer in their VERY NARROW interpetation of the Koran you are an infidel. And, if they succeed you will be dead.

I don't know what you want the US to do. We are the only nation in the world attempting to do anything about this war. We are going it alone........not by choice either. But when you have a world of countries populated with citizens sitting around criticizing, refusing to even offer moral support we have no choice. Oh, yeah we can sit around like you too..........we did that for 40 years and look what happened.

Those are my opinions...........quite different from yours. It's my country that is paying for it (my tax money). It's my countrymen who are dying, coming home wounded, mamed, and sick. It's my country that has to find a way to defend ourselves from this enemy. And we have a huge audience eating popcorn with loads of opinions and suggestions.........little of which are usefull with such statements as equating the attack on my country on 9/11 to a criminal act by a few fanatics. It was an act of war by an organized coalition of vicious terrorists. It was entirely preventable had we not waited some 40 years to react to the beginning of this war........like I said in my first post in this thread "we were asleep at the helm". Hopefully we won't fall asleep again.........but with our present administrations bent on "making amends" we may do it.

It ain't going to be easy.

As someone who grew up in the UK during a very tense time with TERRORIST attacks happening on a very regular basis, I find the current notion of "America, World Police" nauseating. Even though I live on the mainland (when growing up, I lived in one of the most land locked inland cities in this country), there was always a feeling of constant threat. An Army recruiting officer was shot and killed in a car park I had walked through minutes earlier one day. The bins at any public transport station were often blocked off with bomb proof covers. This was because EVERY DAY there was a chance of a terror attack. A terror attack from people KNOWN to have been aided to an extent by those in the US.

Based on the hell we in the UK lived through, should we have invaded America as it had known links to the IRA? Because that's the excuse given for invading Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with the Taliban regime starting to get uppity over a pipeline propsed to run through their country, or the Taliban taking control of the poppy fields, does it? I won't for one moment pretend my western sensibilities weren't appalled at the civil rights of the everyday Afghani under the Taliban, nor will I revel in the irony of the US suffering a terror attack after their attempts to undermine and gain influence of a foreign country. The events of September 11th 2001 were horrific, I can never see any justification for the slaughter of civillians. However, I must admit if the planes had been empty and aimed purely at military targets, I would be less disgusted. Just as I would be less disgusted at the Western forces if they fought more of a ground invasion instead of throwing missles around and ignoring civilian casualties as it meant less soldiers going home in bags. Soldiers who choose to sign up to shoot and be shot at, unlike people living in their own country trying to go to work, or to the shops, who find a bomb landing on them.

At least with Afghanistan an argument could be made for retribution, even if the majority of the actual hijackers were Saudi (but the Saudis are best friends with certain powerful Americans, so we'll ignore that), and even if of those many seem to somehow still be alive. Iraq is a disgrace that should see those behind it infront of a Nuremberg style court. It was and is an outright war of aggression, with no legitimate excuse. Saddam might have been many things, but the excuses trotted out by both the UK and US as cause to invade are emotive and largely fabricated. In the UK, one man who tried to reveal this was ridiculed, challenged, and mysteriously ended up dead in a field. An inquest later led to the neutering of our national TV service, not for telling lies, but for letting the truth come out. The number of Iraqis left dead is reaching a level Sadam could only have dreamed of after only a few years, and the number of troops being killed or injured suggests to me this "liberation" has been highly unwelcome to say the least. The trivial side note that the main priority of the invading forces was to secure the oil fields, and the secondary issue of rebuilding the infrastructure has seen contracts awarded to those close to the allied leaders shows me the war has been a stinking corrupt filth from the moment it was concieved.

Don't get me started on how America did not win the war, or save our sorry asses (never mind our miserable donkeys). Or as already mentioned by others, how the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule instead saw a generation of Communist oppression.

I think for me, I just wish people could be honest. If you want to go blow up a country because the leader made daddy look a fool a few years ago, just say so. If you want to invade somewhere else because you want a bit of pipe and don't like the cut of their jib, so be it. But dodgy dossiers, misleading videotape, ignorance of the UN, and media campaigns about liberation? I thought it was only these corrupt dictatorships that ignored democracy and kept the people muchroomed...

Shambolic, if you want people to be honest, you need to start with yourself.

The sheer mass of distortion and disingenuousness in your post is amazing.

Shambolic, you reap what you sow. If your nation had not spent two and a half centuries "colonizing" the world (excuse to rip off their resources), there would be far fewer problems now. Most of these problems stem from the collapse of the colonial systems instituted by Britain, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Russia, and Germany.

And as for the Irish, you went after them even earlier.

I am so sick of how modern Europe sidesteps their responsibility for all of the failed states that they created.

Well, I have no bookmarks stored, but one number (the civilian victims) is an official WHO number and the US - numbers I took from a serious german magazine "Spiegel" which quoted the CNN counting - the other sources were found by google too, but german sources, since this is my main language and easier to find and read for me.

However: since things related to 9/11 are concentrated on Afghanistan (former and now) I just want to add, that there a 42 Nations working together as ISAF. Within that: Germany, my former country, and Austria where I live now. Plus USA and 39 other countries, incl. EU countries, Nato - and non-Nato countries.

So, you are *not* alone. No one sleeps and no one is only looking what happens. We all lose soldiers, money, material and doing the jobs there...

Hm. Let me see a link or two, three:

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/index.html

and

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2004/oef.casualties/

and here are your friends:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Security_Assistance_Force#Contributing_nations

Also: take "criminals" and "police-action" as metaphore - and what I meant is the ethical thing that it would be normal to bring *only those* to justice who a) did the attack (these are dead meanhwile, they operated the planes) and those who managed the attack from background, means: the brains behind the attack.

To conquer 2 countries and losing more and more own people and causing more and more civilian and other victims, paying billions and billions for that and still we don't know who we do hunting exactly is what gave me something to think about.

However, this should give clear evidence, that you are not alone. We pay lifes and money too to this, especially since it is halfway clear that the training bases for these terrorists were located in Afghanistan and environment and not in Iraq.

Iraq is a pure US - thing in which we have no interest. So far there is no evidence that something came from Iraq, nor that they had so called weapons of mass-destruction, -there was only bigmouth Saddam walking around but had no plans to attack the USA via terrorism. He wanted Kuwait and messing around with the Khurds and concentrating on the region there and the oil-fields as mini-dictator (and long time supported by the US-Government for unknwon reasons, but this is not my beer).

For hunting terrorists and for to prevent further attacks you have any support you want from many countries around the globe, incl. their special forces and other experts, incl. from the region where I lived and live.

Hey, don't forget Belgium!

Actually, this is silly. 'America' doesn't do anything. 'Britain' doesn't do anything. They're land masses. Shambolic said that the IRA was helped in part by people in America. And quite a few people in England too, and various other nationalities. To say that the UK is reaping what it has sown is pointless. The population of this country didn't colonise anyone - people from previous generations did.
You can see the problem when you consider that the hi-jackers were known to have been mainly from Saudi Arabia. So did Saudi Arabia fly into the towers? No, of course not.

So, should we wear a hair shirt for the crimes of our ancestors? I don't think so. I had no power to influence what was done then, and I have little power now over how my country is run. I can vote, and I won't vote for an administration that led us to make war on spurious grounds. Other than signing petitions and perhaps going on a peaceful march, that's pretty much all I can do.

For those who died on 9/11, and those who loved them I have the deepest sympathy, as I do for all innocent victims of human aggression, regardless of the source. In all human conflicts, however 'justifiable' or otherwise, there is collateral dammage. In another place Brenda asked, why can't we all get along? We could, but we won't, because we're not like that.

As to the title of this thread, I don't know. The men who flew the planes into the buildings are dead - for them the war is truly over. Maybe they had to make account of their actions to a higher authority, maybe not. It rather depends on how you define justice.

Don't forget Saddam was planning on going to a gold standard also. Funny how his country was invaded and he himself was hunted down and executed once our wonderful world bankers got wind of his desire to go to a gold standard. Most likely he’d still be murdering Kurds if he hadn’t stepped on the wrong toes in several ways. Industrialized powers don’t to anything unless some fat cat can make a buck off it. Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent life down here... all their leaders take orders from people who have money for brains!

The IRA likely received some funding from north america, but as an organization it was pretty much entirely based in the British Isles. Al-Qaeda was based pretty much entirely in Afghanistan. In addition, post 9 11, US scrutiny of its own borders and indeed its own citizens has been stepped up to paranoid levels.

The point though, is that the link between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was strong, whereas the link between the IRA and the US is weak. They really do not compare.



Which civilian targets have been deliberately bombed? There is always collateral damage. Military targets are not always conveniently outside of populated areas and in fact usually are not. If war ever did break out between the US and Russia, it is generally expected that my home city to be targetted simply because we have stategic value as a major deepwater seaport, even though we have no actual military installations. War isn't pretty or nice. It should be avoided, but sometimes it is the only viable solution.



I agree with you there, especially since the casualty levels are nothing compared to those in past wars. We have gotten to the point where every casualty on our side is treated as if we have lost whole battalions. We should not be at war unless we are willing to understand what it really means.



You are really stretching it there. Country of birth means next to nothing. The attacks originated out of Afghanistan, from an organization suppored and condoned by the Afghan government of the day, a government that routinely used rhretoric such as calling on the death of the west because we do things like (gasp) educate women. If you listen to Taliban rhetoric, they had effectively declared war years before 9 11, regardless of how long it took for there to be an actual attack.

That changes it from retribution to prevention. I am not big on vengence either, but that does not mean condoning the liklihood of subsequent attacks.



Iraq is arguably a disgrace. However now that forces are committed and the damage is done, justice requires seeing it through and bearing the full cost and consequences, not merely pulling out cause omg, friendly troops are dieing, or omg it costs too much. The leaders who started that war should be held accountable, to their own people and to Iraq, but part of that is reparations, and that means staying put until the dust really settles, not pulling out because it is no longer convenient to stay.

I was tired when I posted. You are quite correct to include Belgium.

Sometimes we do have to wear that hair shirt, though. We may not have been around then, but if you came into possession of stolen goods, no matter how innocently, it does not change the fact that those goods were stolen and should be returned.

Sometimes that is practical, sometimes reparations consist merely of a sincere apology, and sometimes nothing is needed in that there was no crime in the first place. War is not in and of itself illegal. It only is when declared so by the rest of the world, usually when certain lines of conduct are crossed during a war, and those lines vary greatly depending on what point in history you look at.

Just because we did not commit crimes directly does not mean it is just to be benefitting from those crimes.

But I don't, not really. I was actually making the point that it was people from those countries THEN who were responsible. And I always find it amusing that when an attack on Europe's old empire building is countered with an attack on the early settlers in America for their behaviour towards the native inhabitants, the usual American response is to say that those people weren't really American, they were English, and French, and Dutch! Guys I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways. They were PEOPLE who lived in America, and some of them behaved badly. Can't you see that slapping a label on an entire country full of PEOPLE and calling them all out collectively is how these problems often begin in the first place?
I live in the UK, my passport identifies me as a British subject, but my ancestors came from France, Ireland and Prussia - all within the past 150 years. So, do I plan to take responsibility for any of the nasty things done by any nationals of those places? Nope - not a chance. I didn't do it, and that's the end. I'm no more sorry for the actions of those people than I am for the actions of any mean, petty twat who thinks that 'love of country' is somehow a calling of near religious import that absolves them of personal liability. We need a whole lot less 'love of country' and a whole lot more genuine brotherhood if we're going to find a way out of this mess.

you seriously think Bush & Co attacked our own country on 9/11?

ewe are aye pea ess why sea ayche oh!

Not blaming anyone specifically. It's a nation thing. Those that are fighting us have a different view of our collective accountability for the actions of our ancestors.

The Imperialism went on long into the 20th Century. Even after WWII. This led to much of the trouble that fanned the fires of the cold war, and the conflicts that rage today. The collapse of the Imperialistic systems, and the resulting poorly drawn up borders guaranteed the trouble that we are in now.

Also, not having it both ways. Spain pretty well destroyed Native American society before the English colonists had a beach head in the new world.

Not joking about Belgium. Look at the mess that they created in the Congo.

LOL sorry but I just have to say something...
Is anyone else enjoying Peggy Paperdoll's malapropisms as much as I am?

Two examples:
...those countries who evade our country...
...they have no conscious...

I'm quite good at things like that. I'm constantly backspacing to correct words typed twice, left out, misspelled, letters in wrong order, and especially typing "and" when I meant "an". But, I guess I get my point across.........I can get a rise out some people (or is that raise?).

If you want to dispute what I've said, then go ahead..........I might respond. If you want to nickpick my typing, spelling, grammar then I guess you have nothing to add to the discussion. Go back to your dictionary to find some more almost never used words in the English language.............that seems to be what gets you off.

What she said.

You know.. something can be funny without need to laugh at the person who said it. Think about the phrases quoted as if you simply heard them without having any clue who said them.

Finding them funny is not a slight against you, they simply were untintetionally funny .

Oh good lord! People, you are doing the very same thing to me! You have not caught on yet to the fact that I am a satirist (as well as an English major). So you'd rather I come back in here and start bellyaching that "oh you don't know me" rather than seeing the humor in what I posted--that's up to you. I'd suggest you lighten up, but I'm not here to tell other people how to behave, unlike some others.
I won't give you the satisfaction of making me be bitchy. Sorry.

Lights out.