Okay then. The big news after the Pope Paul beatification (beautification?) thing is that Osama finally got nailed. I was actually quite surprised that they didn't find him set up somewhere near Vegas. So anyway, wadya reckon... give it three days & he'll ascend on a little cloud right? Don't rule it out. Such things have been well documented in the past.

Give it 300 years and he'll be the Son of God.

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With all due respect & not wishing to imply approval for any of OBL's actions... the atrocities you cite are real & very very nasty; but I am not so sure you can connect them with our current subject. Wacko religious zealots in the Taliban might indulge in that stuff but Osama  directed his efforts against the West. Killing thousands of Moslems among others along the way of course. His goals were politically motivated, not solely religious.

To suggest he was a rabid animal is to give animals - sick or healthy, a bad rap. To engage in extremism the way he did he was definitely disfunctional. It would be very interesting to learn how he came to be what he became. A bit late now I suppose.

Anyway, he's gone & I only hope that we can some day bring his Western compatriots - the Bush / Blair / Howard crew, to some sort of justice. I don't think they should be shot but if you put up a good argument I'll keep an open mind.

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And this will still all happen whether Bin Laden is dead or not... and I don't think he was the one to bring these practices into their culture!  

Perhaps we should just drop a nuke on the whole of the middle east and start fresh with all the ideals of the Western civilisation (you know - the ones who have also slaughtered people for centuries in the name of God, but happily turn the other cheek when a little child is being brutally molested and simply give the offender a tsk tsk and a slap on the wrist).

Human beings are arseholes no matter where they come from, and people will suffer because of their actions.  If I killed everyone who pissed me off I'd be the only one left on earth@ lol

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."
Martin Luther King, Jr  


Yes, I am unashamedly a hippy!

Here are a couple of cool bits I dragged off michaelmoore.com:

Our Code Name for Bin Laden?



'GERONIMO'
Oh American Indians, we have killed people all over the world, but
we will never forget you were our first

'Indian Country'
"... in a world where mass infantry invasions are becoming politically and
diplomatically prohibitive ... the American military is back to the
days of fighting the Indians." – Robert D. Kaplan,
one of George W. Bush's favorite writers

I'm with you Katus

Grey -  listen to more Michael Franti /Spearhead.

I was calling for war against the Taliban well before 9/11, on account of their treatment of women in particular. I agree the international community should've moved against Mugabe long before this. I agree the conduct of the war has been appalling. Yanks are much better at killing than winning, they can't get over the fact that wars are won by infantry and not aircraft or big guns. They're only ever motivated by self interest and 'hearts and minds' stuff just confuses them.

the world actually needs a globalised police force under UN control. There's no place for crack pot despots in the 21stC. It also needs a stable global currency free from speculation, universal health care and children free from poverty and crappy education systems.

That said you have to admit that we in the west have freedoms that most of the worlds people only dream of. If our freedoms are being erroded and if scant progress is being made towards a more egailtarian playing field we only have ourselves to blame.

There was no opposition to war in Afghanistan because people could see that the Taliban and El Quaeda were a bad thing. By the way Arab fighters outnumbered Afghan fighters 3 to 1 in the mujahadeen and Bin Laden co-ordinated most of them. A million people took to the streets in London against the Iraq war, demonstrated peacefully and went home. They should've stayed on the streets and laid siege to Downing street until Blair resigned. In another age they would've done.  Get Up Stand Up indeed! Don't give up the fight, never give up the fight. Pacifism pah!

Grey wrote on May 6^th, 2011 at 10:51am:

Excellent OBL obit in the Guardian this week - still the best newspaper in the world IMO.

I still think the Guardian obit was pretty good, although obviously cobbled together in a hurry it provided a potted history with no obvious bias IMO. The "CIA had no contact with such figures" statement suggests to me the CIA were probably dealing with people they thought were significant at the time, al-Qaida and Bin Laden not emerging until later, a year or so before the Soviets left. Robin Cook's observation that al-Qaida and Bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies" is true, but the operative words are "a product", something that developed from that miscalculation. However I agree with you that the Guardian is not the paper it once was. My dad always extolled the quality of the old Manchester Guardian. Like you probably, I’ve been reading the international edition for many years and have noticed with each physical decrease in size it’s become more like the website version with shorter, eye-catching articles. It definitely ain't what it was, but I still prefer it to most of the competition.