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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

commondata - 01:18pm Oct 13, 2002 EST (# 4843 of 4850)

lchic 10/12/02 10:09am

The 'failures' against human rights relate to the incompetence of minor officials within structures.

And failures happen despite the competence of minor officials. Denis Halliday, the UN's Co-ordinator of Humanitarian Relief to Iraq resigned after 34 years with the UN to protest:

"The very provisions of the Charter of the United Nation are being set aside. We are waging a war through the United Nations, on the children and people of Iraq with incredible results: results that you do not expect to see in a war under the Geneva Conventions".

In February 2000 his successor Hans Von Sponeck resigned after 30 years with the UN saying:

"How long should the civilian population of Iraq be punished for something they have never done."

Two days later Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq (another UN agency) resigned saying she could no longer tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi people.

Moving up from the 'failures' of minor officials, "Donald Rumsfeld's instructions to the Pentagon to 'think the unthinkable' may cause non-Americans to think that the only superpower has been taken over by fundamentalists whose fanatacism promises human carnage on a scale that makes amateurs of the Taliban." The oil group under Bush and Cheney influenced by the "Wolfowitz cabal" are drawn from the extreme right of American political life. I can only hope that the mathematics of polynomial series will take some wind from their sails.

robkettenburg01 - 05:09pm Oct 13, 2002 EST (# 4844 of 4850)

Play "Find the Boeing Jumbo Jet!"

Muslims Suspend Laws of Physics!

The Matrix Document

The truth the media is forbidden to tell you

The Congressional Record of Testimony for the Oklahoma City Federal Building Bombing Damage Analysis

RobKettenburg

rshow55 - 05:45pm Oct 13, 2002 EST (# 4845 of 4850)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

commondata 10/13/02 1:18pm - - the carnage is real, and the moral implications are as big as you say - - - - - but it isn't anything quite as simple (or even quite so clean) as "fanaticism" of "fundamentalists."

A more central, problematic fact is that US military policy has been based on psychological warfare - - on deception of both other nations, and our own people - - for more than fifty years. To win the Cold War - - that may well have been necessary - - but the Cold War should have ended a decade ago.

We have a web of lies - many of them of quite understandable origins - that are making what might otherwise be tractable intractable - for the United States and for the rest of the world. After wars, messes need to be cleaned up. After psychological warfare - patterns of deception leave such messes. We haven't cleaned ours up as we should have.

MD3365 rshow55 7/30/02 8:33pm includes a number of references to postings in the TALK thread Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror . . and includes this:

" It would be worth money, a great deal of safety, and worth honor too for leaders of nation states, all over the world, to ask that some key things about the history of the Cold War be checked.

And related to the present day. Lies are unstable, once they are actually questioned. That can take courage - sometimes more courage than people have. But because lies are unstable, there is a great deal of hope, if people show courage. It seems to me that the NYT showed some courage and industry today.

It isn't as simple a situation as Chomsky sometimes claims, or corrupt in quite the complete way Chomsky sometimes claims. The statements set out in Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee into the collapse of the Enron Corporation. . . . are important, real, and practical. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/13/business/13TEXT.html Excerpts from the following Senators are set out:

John McCain, Republican of Arizona;

Peter G. Fitzgerald, Republican of Illinois;

John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts;

John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana;

Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon;

Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine;

Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California;

Jean Carnahan, Democrat of Missouri;

George F. Allen, Republican of Virginia; and

Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina.

Every one of these excerpts is worth reading, and a credit to its authors, and to America.

I think those statements set out principles and common ground that really matter in America . Common ground very widely held, and cherished, when people are speaking in public, or talking to each other -- or acting where honor counts.

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