support oue military men and women!

Thanks Melba for the compliment. I agree we are at war and different rules apply, although I don't think we should kill POWs, but we have a right to hold them during wartime without a trial. They are not American citizens.
I don't think we need to be mean to Muslims though Melba. there are many good Arabs and Muslims in the U.S.. I'm sorry you have had bad experiences with Arabs. Many are nice people.

"Alice" you are very immature. I am a political independent who didn't vote for Bush I voted for Gore. But I do support our troops. I have a cousin over there. Many of us have friends and relatives there. And yes I do think the people of Iraq would do better under a civilzed government rather than Saddam.

I have traveled in Canada and Latin America. I got along fine with people there and I also get along fine with people from various countries who have immigrated to the U.S. for a better life.

There are 6.2 biilion people in the world. According to the BBC more than 40 million people have attended anti-American, anti-British protests. That is less than 1% of the world. And only a small fraction of them are so immature they would burn a flag.

There were anti-American protests throughout the world during the Cold war against Communism as well. Far more people protested America then. But most rational people agree today that it is a good thing that most of the brutal Communist dictatorships are gone, and that in fact America was right to be against Communist dictatorships.

As Tony Blair said, despite the turmoil now, history will prove us right to remove Saddam Hussein. Just as it proved us right in opposing the Nazis and the Communists.

I may not have voted for Bush but I am proud to be an American. My ancestors were poor people from Mexico and this country has given us a chance for a better life.
And people who burn the flag are immature losers. I have had relatives who fought and sometimes died in World War II, the Korean War,and the Vietnam War , as well as recently. I am proud that they served our country.

Answer the question Maria Dubya Bush.

And don't you dare make assumptions about who I am and how I live my life, Dubya.

Why don't you travel Dubya - go and see how the rest of the world drinks American pop AND burns the Stars'n'Stripes.

Why do you think that is Dubya?

Is that your real name Alice in Wonderland? Grow up a little. Of all the many people in the world to worry about, you worry about some thugs in the Taliban.

Get a life, do something for poor people or volunteer in your community.

Prove it Maria.
I haven't seen any proof.
You seen any? Show me?
If those guys in Guatamamo are terrorists why don't we have them up in front of a jury in front of the whole world and prove it?

Or is this the good ol' American way? Is this what our soldiers are upholding?

I don't think we can take the moral high ground while this hypocrisy continues.

On a more serious note................


LONDON: Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world , but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".

He is, of course, quite right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists that they "must at all times be protected ... against insults and public curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be prosecuted for war crimes.

This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.

His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras.

They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions.

They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).

They were not "released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities" (118), because, the US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting information about Al Qaeda. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No "coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever". In the hope of breaking them, however, the authorities have confined them to solitary cells and subjected them to what is now known as "torture lite": sleep deprivation and constant exposure to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have sought to kill themselves, by smashing their heads against the walls or trying to slash their wrists with plastic cutlery.

The US government claims that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war", but "unlawful combatants". The same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (Al Qaeda) must be regarded as prisoners of war.

Even if there is doubt about how such people should be classified, article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal". But when, earlier this month, lawyers representing 16 of them demanded a court hearing, the US court of appeals ruled that as Guantanamo Bay is not sovereign US territory, the men have no constitutional rights. Many of these prisoners appear to have been working in Afghanistan as teachers, engineers or aid workers. If the US government either tried or released them, its embarrassing lack of evidence would be brought to light.

You would hesitate to describe these prisoners as lucky, unless you knew what had happened to some of the other men captured by the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. On November 21 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pakhtoon civilians surrendered at Konduz to the Northern Alliance commander, General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them have never been seen again.

As Jamie Doran's film Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death records, some hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were loaded into container lorries at Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i- Sharif, on November 26 and 27. The doors were sealed and the lorries were left to stand in the sun for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan prison, 80 miles away. The prisoners, many of whom were dying of thirst and asphyxiation, started banging on the sides of the trucks. Dostum's men stopped the convoy and machine-gunned the containers. When they arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives were dead.

The US special forces running the prison watched the bodies being unloaded. They instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of them before satellite pictures can be taken". Doran interviewed a Northern Alliance soldier guarding the prison. "I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them." Another soldier alleged: "They took the prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned them to the prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they disappeared."

Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili. In the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into ditches. Anyone who moved was shot.

The German newspaper Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts on this issue." The US group Physicians for Human Rights visited the places identified by Doran's witnesses and found they "all ... contained human remains consistent with their designation as possible grave sites".

It should not be necessary to point out that hospitality of this kind also contravenes the third Geneva convention, which prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture", as well as extra-judicial execution. Donald Rumsfeld's department, assisted by a pliant media, has done all it can to suppress Jamie Doran's film, while General Dostum has begun to assassinate his witnesses.

It is not hard, therefore, to see why the US government fought first to prevent the establishment of the international criminal court, and then to ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its jurisdiction. The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras yesterday should thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of the American forces fighting for civilization, but of the "barbaric and inhuman" Iraqis.

George Monbiot, Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

I was thinking today about America's cultural influence on the world and I have to admit that alot of what we export is junk, especially some of our junk food, which many Americans, including myself, don't actually eat all that much, and some of our pop music, especially rap and heavy metal(which is idiot teenage racket music).

What is disturbing is not so much that America exports this junk, (after all we are a society descended from lower class, crude peasants that immigrated to America because we were the poor unwanted, uncultured, working class of other countries) but that supposedly more cultured and sophisticated people, like the Western Europeans, purchase so much of this junk!If they are so cultured and have produced the Beethovens and Monets of the world, why do they buy so much of this garbage?
And you can't blame it just on big business and advertising alone, after all you have to assume that Europeans actually have minds, and freedom of choice, and the capacity to make intelligent decisions on what to buy.

I'm not saying all of our food and pop music is bad; some traditional American food is very good and healthy, as well as some of our ethnic food.

And some American blues, country/bluegrass music, Latin jazz music,etc. is actually wonderful music, but it seems that the WORST of American music sells the most overseas!( Cases in point ;Emimnen, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Manson, violent Metal and "Gangsta" rap, etc.).

Our great singers and musicians like John Hyatt, Tito Puentes, Los Lobos, Alison Krausse, Vince Gill,etc., many people overseas know nothing about them, but they know our noisy, juvenile, teenage junk music!
Maybe us Americans don't know better, crude people that we are, but these supposedly sophisticated foreigners should know better.

But they buy more of this garbage than many Americans do!

I will defend our movie industry though. Obviously there are many stupid movies made and many uneccesairly violent shoot 'em up action movies made, but there are also some great movies made in America, and I think those movies are popular worldwide for a reason. They are interesting and very entertaining.
I do love the movies! They can be a great escape from the mundane tedium of everyday life!

Of course much of the foreign pop music I have heard isn't a whole lot better than America's. I guess there isn't that much really great pop music.

I'm sorry that your friends were killed. Were they killed in a recent conflict?

In this war that is going on now?



I hope the war is over soon too withas few deaths as possible on either side.

I know many of us have friends or relatives over there. It is a difficult time but America has lost people many times before and we always seem to get through it.

Brent and Sophie,

Uzma was attempting to be clever. You know, sarcastic.

This thread was an interesting conversation for awhile. It's sort of deteriorating into emotional jibberish. When it just gets to be anger and sarcasim not much of anything interesting gets said.

But as I initially said, I just hope the war gets over as soon as possible with a minimum of causalities.
I don't know if that is going to happen the way things are going.

I hope my cousin, Ingrid's brother , and other friends and relatives of people on this board make it home safe and that the war is over soon.

Whaaat??? Uzma?

What was all that about?




I really enjoyed your posts Brent, Thanks.

I've enjoyed all of these posts....

Hello Brent! Glad you wrote! You are another smart one!
We are really getting some interesting viewpoints here aren't we! I don't know if any of us are really right but at least we are using our thinking caps!


I agree with you on some things and disagree on others Brent.


For sure we are getting ever more connected to Latin America and growing further away from Europe. And we are for sure more conservative than Europe. Over 1/2 of Americans attend church every week. I read that in Europe it is 2% weekly church attendance, which is unfathomable to most Americans! We do have larger family sizes and more immigrants, especially from Latin America, and we are growing rapidly in population and in economic growth.

Europe's population is stagnant and in some countries even declining. And because their economy is more socialistic and regulated than ours they don't have the job growth we have and have chronically higher unemployment. But their government does provide more services but they pay for it with higher taxes.

I have to disagree with you Brent about the Muslim world though. Europe's major ethnic minority and immigrant group is Arab Muslims. In the U.S. it is Christian Hispanics. The U.S. is less than 2% Muslim. The Western Hemisphere is 1% Muslim. That is very different than Europe or the Middle East.

We are more conservative like the Arabs but we are very Christian. It is very hard for most Americans to understand the Arab world. As soon as we switch off of oil to alternative fuels, which we eventually will do, I think we will have little to do with either Europe or the Middle East. And has been mentioned on this thread already, most of our trade is with Canada, Mexico, Latin America and the Buddhist countries of eastern Asia, whom we don't seem to have many problems with. In fact the East Asians are so good at business and science and so easy to get along with, that most Americans enjoy doing business with East Asians. European-Americans that I know seem to like the Chinese and Japanese better than they like their fellow white Europeans from Europe. The exception to that may be the Brits and the Irish whom everyone in America seems to like better than other Europeans.

I agree with you that most of the world progresses whether America is "Imperialist" or not. Most of the riots and hysteria over American policy( other than liberal wealthy kids on college campuses) is in Western Europe or the Muslim world. The rest of the world doesn't care that much especially Latin America and East Asia.

I was talking with my fiancee tonight Brent . He read somewhere on the internet that 40 million people worldwide have attended anti-war rallies against U.S. and British policies. That sounds like a huge number until you realize that there are 6.2 billion people in the world. 40 million isn't even 1% of the world!

Even if most of the world doesn't like the war, you are right, they have other things they are doing in their working and personal lives. Just like we read about some problem between the Catholics and Protestants in northern Ireland or the Hutus and Tutsis in Rawandha, and we say "that's too bad" then we go on with our lives.

You can't take the problems of the whole world on your shoulders, it's too big a world with too many conflicts and problems.


Uzma thinks the whole world hates America but they listen to our music, eat our hamburgers, and watch our movies practically everywhere! And most of them COULD CARE LESS about America OR the Middle East. They have got their own problems.