ZO study history, then reply. America had nothing to do with the death of Incan, or Mayan empires for starters. We do have a great burden of being so terrible to North American natives, it's true. So I suppose if we're guilty of one sin, we're guilty of them all. Hey, if you want us to bear the burden of all the world's wrongs, be my guest. we can take it better than others I imagine. We'll even accept the Belgian/Boer role in Africa's turbulent history in the last three centuries. I'm sure others already see it this way. As I've said in other threads, no one is innocent. It does not change any of this. That argument is a circular one, it gets us nowhere, changes nothing.
As an American, I can say with great confidence that many if not most Americans do NOT simply try to pigeon-hole others into convenient groups like, say "Americans" in your connotation of the word. indeed, pretty much all of the people I know do not give the evil eye to an Afgahni or Palestinian or whomever on the street. We like to see people as individuals first. I suggest you try to learn this yourself before judging in such a way.
Alas, your bigotry is apparent. Please don't condemn us as anything you look to be yourself. I realize life is easier for those lazy enough to pigeon-hole others into facile and convenient "types" but you won't be a better person, nor will you get far in life by this at least if there is any justice. Of course, if you don't plan on going anywhere, I suppose you can blame us rich fat lazy Americans if it makes you feel better.
My dad works at a law firm in San Francisco and one of his good friends agreed to represent the kid in court. He didn't tell the law firm that he was doing so and now a whole bunch of lawyers in the New York branch are threatening to quite over it. I personally think the kid deserves a good defense. I do not believe that he had an mal-intentions against the United States but instead just got caught up in something that he was not prepared for. I mean he goes to Afghanistan as a humanitarian worker, falls in love with the culture and its people, and next thing he knows there are commandoes up his ass. But treason is treason, so I say give him the fair trial and let his sit in prison for a year or two and think about what he has done. Remember that he probably thought that he was simply fighting the Northern Alliance who truth be told are a bunch of drug growing warlords.
<strong>I do not believe that he had an mal-intentions against the United States but instead just got caught up in something that he was not prepared for. I mean he goes to Afghanistan as a humanitarian worker,</strong><hr></blockquote>
Humanitarian worker? I haven't read that. The whole story hasn't come out yet so maybe it's true. But considering he was "educated" in a Pakistani madrassa I can't only think that he knew why he was going to Afghanistan.
[quote]Originally posted by solo:
<strong>falls in love with the culture and its people, and next thing he knows there are commandoes up his ass.</strong><hr></blockquote>
What I read was that he found himself in Kabul and didn't speak the local language. So they told him to go join the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda. He supported the attack on the Cole and was at the training camp several times when bin Laden was there. So he knew what he was getting into. He wasn't just grabbed off the street.
[quote]Originally posted by solo:
<strong>But treason is treason, so I say give him the fair trial and let his sit in prison for a year or two and think about what he has done. Remember that he probably thought that he was simply fighting the Northern Alliance who truth be told are a bunch of drug growing warlords.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yea but they're better than the other growing warlords.
WSJ? Why does it have to be so good? I'll quote the best part up top here.
"When he was only 17 they deemed him mature enough to don turban and robes and take a voyage to Yemen. Now that he's 20 and has arrived at the Taliban terminus of his personal journey, suddenly he's too young to know his own mind."
In Marin County, Calif., treason is just another alternative lifestyle.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, December 6, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Were the story of John Walker Lindh not so horribly real, it could play as a parody of our times. Mr. Walker, a 20-year-old American, goes to war in Afghanistan. Except he fights not for America, but against us, on the side of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. By the time he's captured, AK-47 in hand, Mr. Walker is filthy, wounded and famished, but to a persistent reporter from Newsweek he manages to gasp out his support for the Islamic terrorist attacks that, out of a clear blue sky, killed more than 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11.
Which sounds bad. But hey, dude, John--aÂ*kÂ*a "Sulayman," aÂ*kÂ*a "Abdul Hamid"--is from Marin County, Calif., a place where it is, like, totally uncool to make value judgments.
From Marin, the young Mr. Walker's parents spot him on the TV news and hustle to share with the world the alternative reality that shaped this self-described jihadi in the first place. Their son John is a spiritual, questing guy, we are told, a pacifist at heart, young and maybe susceptible to brainwashing. John's mother, Marilyn Walker, tells the press that her son is just a "sweet, shy kid," "totally not streetwise," a peaceful, scholarly type who wanted to help poor people. His father, Frank Lindh, announces that John "is a really good boy" even if he does deserve "a little kick in the butt for not telling me what he was up to."
A Marin musician, Neil Lavin, tells the Associated Press that Mr. Walker was in Afghanistan on a spiritual quest, quite possibly a rewarding one: "I imagine he lost himself there. Or found himself." A family friend, Bill Jones, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that fighting for bin Laden was just "a youthful indiscretion."
Even outside Marin, a lot of folks just don't seem to get it. In one account after another, there is the same perplexed tone: How could it happen that John Walker Lindh, the second of three children reared by broad-minded parents in the emotionally supportive 1990s, in a 3,000-sqare-foot home in one of the wealthiest enclaves on the California coast, ended up questing away with an assault weapon on the enemy side in Afghanistan? Newsweek quotes Mr. Lindh, his father, as saying, "I can't connect the dots between where John was and where John is." The magazine concludes: "Neither, it seems, can the rest of the world."
Oh really? The dots we've seen so far--especially in Newsweek and on CNN--invite some definite connecting.
What jumps out is a sorry sketch of the real world colliding with American culture at its most neurotically all-validating no-fault New Age nadir of nattering nonsense. No where in the nation could this particular picture have more naturally taken shape than in that Mecca of moral muddling, Marin County--a place salted with rich aging radicals of the 1960s, long on dollars but still short on sense. Recite the publicly known details of John Walker's life, and you have a narrative in which every authority figure in sight was so busy validating John and his alternative ways that no one stepped in soon enough to save him, or stop him.
And what he ended up doing, as reported so far, does not sound good. To venture a word that on the evidence seems to have gone missing from the Marin vocabulary (except when invoked to mean "good"), it sounds bad. American authorities now face the job of deciding whether Mr. Walker deserves to be tried for treason, which can carry a death penalty.
By his own account, Mr. Walker went to Afghanistan six months ago and trained for combat at a camp for supporters of Osama bin Laden. He fought with Taliban-linked Pakistanis against India, in Kashmir--a place riven for the past 10 years by terrorist violence and kidnappings. He then returned to Afghanistan to fight on the side of the Taliban against Americans and the Northern Alliance. Mr. Walker was captured among the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who began the ferocious prison riot that killed a CIA agent, David Spann--a man who gave his life for the country John Walker betrayed.
But hey, give old Abdul Hamid a chance. Named originally for John Lennon, John Walker was raised in an atmosphere so swamped with tolerance it's small wonder he began to drown. His parents are now going through what they describe as an amicable divorce. His father is a Catholic. His mother dabbles in Buddhism, which according to Newsweek she credits for exposing John to a philosophy "very inclusive of all people" and imbued with a "sense of social justice."
John spent only a few months at a regular high school before transferring to the "alternative" Tamiscal High School, a place for artistic types specializing in independent study that, according to the school's Web site "works differently in many ways." Students are left to pilot their own journeys of self-discovery, while checking in with teachers once a week. At age 16, John read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," and in it found himself yet another alternative--he converted to Islam.
In keeping with Islamic laws, Mr. Walker grew a beard and began praying regularly at a local mosque. He took to wearing Islamic robes and a turban, while his parents gushed over what they are still lauding as his "alternative course." He graduated early from the flexible Tamiscal High, and at 17, with his parents' blessing, he went to Yemen to study Arabic. He came back to California, briefly, but in February 2000 he returned to Yemen. Newsweek reports: "It was during John's second trip to Yemen, says his father, that he became aware that John had friends who had been to Chechnya to fight with Muslim rebels against the Russian army. One friend had been killed in the fighting."
Last October, John and his father had what Mr. Lindh described to CNN's Larry King as "a little father/son debate, much like my dad and I used to have over the Vietnam war" (was the young Mr. Lindh consorting with combat-ready Viet Cong?). Mr. Lindh was upset that the American sailors killed in the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden were the same age as John. John e-mailed him back that the terrorist bombing was justified.
Mr. Lindh concluded, reports Newsweek, that "My days of molding him were over." But the days of funding him went right on. When John moved to Pakistan, enrolled in a madrassa near the Afghan border and asked his dad for money, Mr. Lindh wired $1,200. John told his parents he was heading "somewhere cooler" for a while and disappeared into Afghanistan. Cool, huh?
And here we all are, in the midst of a real war with American lives on the line. And there are Mr. Lindh and Ms. Walker, who say they were horrified by Sept. 11, pleading for mercy for their son who joined the enemy. And they still don't get it. Mr. Lindh, who tells the world, "I'm proud of John," insists "there's no indication he's done anything wrong." In the world they inhabit, could John ever do anything wrong? When he was only 17 they deemed him mature enough to don turban and robes and take a voyage to Yemen. Now that he's 20 and has arrived at the Taliban terminus of his personal journey, suddenly he's too young to know his own mind. But through it all, says his father, "he found this other spiritual path, and I have always supported that."
It's painful to watch. It's tragic. But that doesn't make it all right. Somewhere between the kid in Marin with a book and the man in Afghanistan with a gun, there's a line that has been crossed. Connect the dots and you'll see it.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."
jesus christ.. it was an example people. I KNOW the USA had nothing to do with killing the Mayas... I was trying to show a possible way that John had gotten so involved with something like the Taliban.
Its useless to argue with Scott H becasue he will never ever change his opinion. We all have out opinions and there is nothing that can be done about that.
I am a person that does not like to jump to conclusions and label things 'good' or 'bad' and that is why, no matter how evil (in our perspective) a person can seem, I try and look at where s/he is coming from and TRY to understand.
You must understand that we do NOT all think alike or have the same way of thinking. Thank god.
John thought only of Islam and the beauty of it. He then was in a place where you could not get ANY OTHER VIEW but that of Islam and the extremist views. Do you understand that? Can you try and put yourself in his position? Pretend (this is dumb, I know) that you are an extreme Mac user and love Apple, etc. You study it and use it for your whole life and you finally get an opportunity to go to MWNY and when you get there, you are surrounded by other fanatical Mac users. You are in heaven. While you are there you will find people that are more or less extreme... and depending with whom you speak, you will be very likely persuaded in one way or another.
This analogy is to compare the state of mind... not the situation. Heck, many people compare Mac fanaticism to a religion.. so why not?
(I can't wait to get dissed yet again... ah well... can't bend down just because I have my own views)
<strong>I am a person that does not like to jump to conclusions and label things 'good' or 'bad' and that is why, no matter how evil (in our perspective) a person can seem, I try and look at where s/he is coming from and TRY to understand.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I guess, ZO, that any crime can and should be forgiven as long as we can understand how the perpetrator arrived at the mindset that made the act seem OK to him.
That article painted a picture of a kid that had a real similar view as you. He was very permissive in his thinking and upbringing, and it appears that he also tried to see the other sides view. But unlike you he went out and committed treason against his country and committed or at least condoned terrorist acts against the same said contry. I can see how you would defend him, but I do not agree with your defence. The guy is a traitor and I beleive he has earned the death penalty unless it can be proven that he was otherwise innocent.
The guy may just get off with a hand slap though. Anyone remember what Jane Fonda did during Vietnam? If you do not know, she deserves to be prosecuted as well for her traitorous actions. Read <a href="http://www.snopes2.com/inboxer/outrage/fonda.htm"; target="_blank">here</a> for more on this.
As far as I know she has not been tried for her actions, but she should be. And people wonder why some feel it is ok to be a traitor to ones nation so long as you believe in what you are doing. We let one off, what's another one now? Is her actions less because of time? I don't think so.
<strong>Some more on what went on in that prison. Look <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/668588.asp"; target="_blank">HERE</a>.</strong><hr></blockquote>
OOOOOO! ya, that guy is guilty. I had no idea that he took part in the killing of CIA agent nor that he had seen an American soldier before we has captured.
Doesn't it seem (from that article on MSNBC) that this guy had every chance to say to the CIA dudes "Get me the hell out of here, I'm an American and I've been shanghai'd by these crazy terrorists! I had no idea what I was getting into, and I want my mommy. I miss Starbucks and I miss the cute girls back home!"
<strong>Some more on what went on in that prison. Look <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/668588.asp"; target="_blank">HERE</a>.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Holy crap that puts him RIGHT THERE. When I read that they interviewed him I though, "Crap. Now they can't use any of it in court." I'm glad he didn't answer any questions.
If this is true they have to charge this guy with treason and murder at the very least.
like i said before, the kid is guilty of treason. it's a real crime.
it bothers me that people have become so permissive as to think that crap like this is "cute".
although, i should say that i don't think they should bring him home. leave him in a middle eastern prison. preferably one in pakistan. i'm sure he'll make lots of new friends there.
whatever people... I guess I'll be the next terrorist because I more relaxed about life and don't take things so damn seriously all the time. Life goes on...
Maybe we are being too hard on John. Who among us hasn't taken up arms in a radical foreign militia? When I was back packing in Europe I got mixed up with the Basque country fighters. They gave me military training and I spent several months fighting. You know? One of those crazy things you do when your a kid.
Maybe they should offer to send John to India. See what they do with him
<strong>the article is pretty good... gives insight to the last few moments.
But John didnt do ANYTHING... at least not that we know of. He just kneeled and didn't talk.
Ah well..</strong><hr></blockquote>
Here's what he did because you don't seem to get it. He was with the people that killed the CIA agent. Treason may be the only crime where guilty by association is allowed. We don't know the time line but it seems like right after the CIA guys got done with him. If he said something to his Muslim brothers that got that CIA guy killed that is treason and murder.
As we learn more we see that he was deeply involved with Al Qaeda and in direct contact with the people that killed on of our guys. That's enough for me.
<strong>whatever people... I guess I'll be the next terrorist because I more relaxed about life and don't take things so damn seriously all the time. Life goes on...
adios</strong><hr></blockquote>
Zo, I don't think anyone was saying you'll be the next terrorist. But doesn't it seem like at least SOME things deserve to be taken "so damn seriously?"
In life we have many choices. Some we make because they are what we want. Some we make because it is expected. Some we make because of our feelings. Many times we make these choices without thinking of the consequences to ourselves or others. When we are young consequences and responsibility for those choices are not as high a priority (or we haven't been schooled by life to expect someone holding us responsible yet). He made a choice and he is young and didn't take into account consequences. He will be held responsible for his choices and that is proper and part of life. Unfortunately the consequences and the responsibility will probably be a trial for treason with the distinct possibility that he will be found guilty and executed. It is truly unfortunate that American culture prior to 9/11/01 didn't teach him these lessons while much younger and before he made the choice to become a traitor.
Comments
As an American, I can say with great confidence that many if not most Americans do NOT simply try to pigeon-hole others into convenient groups like, say "Americans" in your connotation of the word. indeed, pretty much all of the people I know do not give the evil eye to an Afgahni or Palestinian or whomever on the street. We like to see people as individuals first. I suggest you try to learn this yourself before judging in such a way.
Alas, your bigotry is apparent. Please don't condemn us as anything you look to be yourself. I realize life is easier for those lazy enough to pigeon-hole others into facile and convenient "types" but you won't be a better person, nor will you get far in life by this at least if there is any justice. Of course, if you don't plan on going anywhere, I suppose you can blame us rich fat lazy Americans if it makes you feel better.
<strong>I do not believe that he had an mal-intentions against the United States but instead just got caught up in something that he was not prepared for. I mean he goes to Afghanistan as a humanitarian worker,</strong><hr></blockquote>
Humanitarian worker? I haven't read that. The whole story hasn't come out yet so maybe it's true. But considering he was "educated" in a Pakistani madrassa I can't only think that he knew why he was going to Afghanistan.
[quote]Originally posted by solo:
<strong>falls in love with the culture and its people, and next thing he knows there are commandoes up his ass.</strong><hr></blockquote>
What I read was that he found himself in Kabul and didn't speak the local language. So they told him to go join the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda. He supported the attack on the Cole and was at the training camp several times when bin Laden was there. So he knew what he was getting into. He wasn't just grabbed off the street.
[quote]Originally posted by solo:
<strong>But treason is treason, so I say give him the fair trial and let his sit in prison for a year or two and think about what he has done. Remember that he probably thought that he was simply fighting the Northern Alliance who truth be told are a bunch of drug growing warlords.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yea but they're better than the other growing warlords.
"When he was only 17 they deemed him mature enough to don turban and robes and take a voyage to Yemen. Now that he's 20 and has arrived at the Taliban terminus of his personal journey, suddenly he's too young to know his own mind."
<a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/cRosett/?id=95001558"; target="_blank">Johnnie Walker on the Rocks</a>
In Marin County, Calif., treason is just another alternative lifestyle.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, December 6, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Were the story of John Walker Lindh not so horribly real, it could play as a parody of our times. Mr. Walker, a 20-year-old American, goes to war in Afghanistan. Except he fights not for America, but against us, on the side of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. By the time he's captured, AK-47 in hand, Mr. Walker is filthy, wounded and famished, but to a persistent reporter from Newsweek he manages to gasp out his support for the Islamic terrorist attacks that, out of a clear blue sky, killed more than 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11.
Which sounds bad. But hey, dude, John--aÂ*kÂ*a "Sulayman," aÂ*kÂ*a "Abdul Hamid"--is from Marin County, Calif., a place where it is, like, totally uncool to make value judgments.
From Marin, the young Mr. Walker's parents spot him on the TV news and hustle to share with the world the alternative reality that shaped this self-described jihadi in the first place. Their son John is a spiritual, questing guy, we are told, a pacifist at heart, young and maybe susceptible to brainwashing. John's mother, Marilyn Walker, tells the press that her son is just a "sweet, shy kid," "totally not streetwise," a peaceful, scholarly type who wanted to help poor people. His father, Frank Lindh, announces that John "is a really good boy" even if he does deserve "a little kick in the butt for not telling me what he was up to."
A Marin musician, Neil Lavin, tells the Associated Press that Mr. Walker was in Afghanistan on a spiritual quest, quite possibly a rewarding one: "I imagine he lost himself there. Or found himself." A family friend, Bill Jones, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that fighting for bin Laden was just "a youthful indiscretion."
Even outside Marin, a lot of folks just don't seem to get it. In one account after another, there is the same perplexed tone: How could it happen that John Walker Lindh, the second of three children reared by broad-minded parents in the emotionally supportive 1990s, in a 3,000-sqare-foot home in one of the wealthiest enclaves on the California coast, ended up questing away with an assault weapon on the enemy side in Afghanistan? Newsweek quotes Mr. Lindh, his father, as saying, "I can't connect the dots between where John was and where John is." The magazine concludes: "Neither, it seems, can the rest of the world."
Oh really? The dots we've seen so far--especially in Newsweek and on CNN--invite some definite connecting.
What jumps out is a sorry sketch of the real world colliding with American culture at its most neurotically all-validating no-fault New Age nadir of nattering nonsense. No where in the nation could this particular picture have more naturally taken shape than in that Mecca of moral muddling, Marin County--a place salted with rich aging radicals of the 1960s, long on dollars but still short on sense. Recite the publicly known details of John Walker's life, and you have a narrative in which every authority figure in sight was so busy validating John and his alternative ways that no one stepped in soon enough to save him, or stop him.
And what he ended up doing, as reported so far, does not sound good. To venture a word that on the evidence seems to have gone missing from the Marin vocabulary (except when invoked to mean "good"), it sounds bad. American authorities now face the job of deciding whether Mr. Walker deserves to be tried for treason, which can carry a death penalty.
By his own account, Mr. Walker went to Afghanistan six months ago and trained for combat at a camp for supporters of Osama bin Laden. He fought with Taliban-linked Pakistanis against India, in Kashmir--a place riven for the past 10 years by terrorist violence and kidnappings. He then returned to Afghanistan to fight on the side of the Taliban against Americans and the Northern Alliance. Mr. Walker was captured among the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who began the ferocious prison riot that killed a CIA agent, David Spann--a man who gave his life for the country John Walker betrayed.
But hey, give old Abdul Hamid a chance. Named originally for John Lennon, John Walker was raised in an atmosphere so swamped with tolerance it's small wonder he began to drown. His parents are now going through what they describe as an amicable divorce. His father is a Catholic. His mother dabbles in Buddhism, which according to Newsweek she credits for exposing John to a philosophy "very inclusive of all people" and imbued with a "sense of social justice."
John spent only a few months at a regular high school before transferring to the "alternative" Tamiscal High School, a place for artistic types specializing in independent study that, according to the school's Web site "works differently in many ways." Students are left to pilot their own journeys of self-discovery, while checking in with teachers once a week. At age 16, John read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," and in it found himself yet another alternative--he converted to Islam.
In keeping with Islamic laws, Mr. Walker grew a beard and began praying regularly at a local mosque. He took to wearing Islamic robes and a turban, while his parents gushed over what they are still lauding as his "alternative course." He graduated early from the flexible Tamiscal High, and at 17, with his parents' blessing, he went to Yemen to study Arabic. He came back to California, briefly, but in February 2000 he returned to Yemen. Newsweek reports: "It was during John's second trip to Yemen, says his father, that he became aware that John had friends who had been to Chechnya to fight with Muslim rebels against the Russian army. One friend had been killed in the fighting."
Last October, John and his father had what Mr. Lindh described to CNN's Larry King as "a little father/son debate, much like my dad and I used to have over the Vietnam war" (was the young Mr. Lindh consorting with combat-ready Viet Cong?). Mr. Lindh was upset that the American sailors killed in the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden were the same age as John. John e-mailed him back that the terrorist bombing was justified.
Mr. Lindh concluded, reports Newsweek, that "My days of molding him were over." But the days of funding him went right on. When John moved to Pakistan, enrolled in a madrassa near the Afghan border and asked his dad for money, Mr. Lindh wired $1,200. John told his parents he was heading "somewhere cooler" for a while and disappeared into Afghanistan. Cool, huh?
And here we all are, in the midst of a real war with American lives on the line. And there are Mr. Lindh and Ms. Walker, who say they were horrified by Sept. 11, pleading for mercy for their son who joined the enemy. And they still don't get it. Mr. Lindh, who tells the world, "I'm proud of John," insists "there's no indication he's done anything wrong." In the world they inhabit, could John ever do anything wrong? When he was only 17 they deemed him mature enough to don turban and robes and take a voyage to Yemen. Now that he's 20 and has arrived at the Taliban terminus of his personal journey, suddenly he's too young to know his own mind. But through it all, says his father, "he found this other spiritual path, and I have always supported that."
It's painful to watch. It's tragic. But that doesn't make it all right. Somewhere between the kid in Marin with a book and the man in Afghanistan with a gun, there's a line that has been crossed. Connect the dots and you'll see it.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."
Its useless to argue with Scott H becasue he will never ever change his opinion. We all have out opinions and there is nothing that can be done about that.
I am a person that does not like to jump to conclusions and label things 'good' or 'bad' and that is why, no matter how evil (in our perspective) a person can seem, I try and look at where s/he is coming from and TRY to understand.
You must understand that we do NOT all think alike or have the same way of thinking. Thank god.
John thought only of Islam and the beauty of it. He then was in a place where you could not get ANY OTHER VIEW but that of Islam and the extremist views. Do you understand that? Can you try and put yourself in his position? Pretend (this is dumb, I know) that you are an extreme Mac user and love Apple, etc. You study it and use it for your whole life and you finally get an opportunity to go to MWNY and when you get there, you are surrounded by other fanatical Mac users. You are in heaven. While you are there you will find people that are more or less extreme... and depending with whom you speak, you will be very likely persuaded in one way or another.
This analogy is to compare the state of mind... not the situation. Heck, many people compare Mac fanaticism to a religion.. so why not?
(I can't wait to get dissed yet again... ah well... can't bend down just because I have my own views)
<strong>I am a person that does not like to jump to conclusions and label things 'good' or 'bad' and that is why, no matter how evil (in our perspective) a person can seem, I try and look at where s/he is coming from and TRY to understand.</strong><hr></blockquote>
That article painted a picture of a kid that had a real similar view as you. He was very permissive in his thinking and upbringing, and it appears that he also tried to see the other sides view. But unlike you he went out and committed treason against his country and committed or at least condoned terrorist acts against the same said contry. I can see how you would defend him, but I do not agree with your defence. The guy is a traitor and I beleive he has earned the death penalty unless it can be proven that he was otherwise innocent.
As far as I know she has not been tried for her actions, but she should be. And people wonder why some feel it is ok to be a traitor to ones nation so long as you believe in what you are doing. We let one off, what's another one now? Is her actions less because of time? I don't think so.
<strong>Some more on what went on in that prison. Look <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/668588.asp"; target="_blank">HERE</a>.</strong><hr></blockquote>
OOOOOO! ya, that guy is guilty. I had no idea that he took part in the killing of CIA agent nor that he had seen an American soldier before we has captured.
<strong>Some more on what went on in that prison. Look <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/668588.asp"; target="_blank">HERE</a>.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Holy crap that puts him RIGHT THERE. When I read that they interviewed him I though, "Crap. Now they can't use any of it in court." I'm glad he didn't answer any questions.
If this is true they have to charge this guy with treason and murder at the very least.
it bothers me that people have become so permissive as to think that crap like this is "cute".
although, i should say that i don't think they should bring him home. leave him in a middle eastern prison. preferably one in pakistan. i'm sure he'll make lots of new friends there.
adios
But John didnt do ANYTHING... at least not that we know of. He just kneeled and didn't talk.
Ah well..
Maybe they should offer to send John to India. See what they do with him
<strong>the article is pretty good... gives insight to the last few moments.
But John didnt do ANYTHING... at least not that we know of. He just kneeled and didn't talk.
Ah well..</strong><hr></blockquote>
Here's what he did because you don't seem to get it. He was with the people that killed the CIA agent. Treason may be the only crime where guilty by association is allowed. We don't know the time line but it seems like right after the CIA guys got done with him. If he said something to his Muslim brothers that got that CIA guy killed that is treason and murder.
As we learn more we see that he was deeply involved with Al Qaeda and in direct contact with the people that killed on of our guys. That's enough for me.
<strong>whatever people... I guess I'll be the next terrorist because I more relaxed about life and don't take things so damn seriously all the time. Life goes on...
adios</strong><hr></blockquote>
Zo, I don't think anyone was saying you'll be the next terrorist. But doesn't it seem like at least SOME things deserve to be taken "so damn seriously?"