Freedom of Speech, yea right....

DBibeau855 wrote: smitty's bro wrote: oldsoldier wrote: As for the 5 in the Iraqi house, war is tragic, and those 3 american female aid workers and the two missionaries, along with the 12 Iraqis killed by the roadside bomb saturday did not even get a mention in the major media. We make a mistake, the "terrorists" intentionally kill, and we are portrayed as the badguy in our media.......whose side are the media actually on. God forbid that someone with eyes that see, ears that hear, and a brain in the middle of it all could look at the daily news and surmise from the daily executions of Iraqi security and public officials, that things aren't going well in Iraq. It's just that liberal media blowing things out of proportion again. you havent seen anything, you havent heard anything... you have seen what they wanted you to see, and you heard what they wanted you to hear, its like what they said about the whole thing with the IRA in Ireland, "If you arent confused, you dont know whats going on" the only people who really have a clue, are our soldiers, not CNN, not NBC, or anything other pretty boy news anchor that thinks hes "a real journalist" because he spent a month in iraq, hes still soft, our boys are over there ground poundin it, they are making history, they are the history, they are helping a revolution take place

Actually, I have heard some things:

Mayor of Baghdad assassinated

Govenor of Baghdad province assassinated

Deputiy director, security svcs assassinated

4:1 Iraqi security to American GIs killed daily

I think that all video news (Fox, CNN, et al) is suspect, therefor I get my info from written news and radio. Fox likes to show stories of a school reopening, but not report on the busload of kids beheaded on their way there. CNN vice-versa.

I think you can read the news and get a pretty good idea that things aren't working out so well:

1. Iraqis are not picking up arms and fighting for themselves, U.S. soldiers have to do it for them. At what point did liberating Iraqis become the work of our soldiers?

2. Every high-level American official to leave post in Iraq has slipped a memo to the press stating that we are never going to win there (CIA bureau chief, U.S. interim governor, etc.)

3. The violence is escalating, the troop commitments are escalating by 15k-20k annually.

Now what don't I know?

Don't buy it.

First point - guerilla fighters are fighting for freedom, not religious whatever.

 - Both "guerilla" and "terrorism" are nothing but tactics.  The are mere methods of fighting.  Ideology is irrelevant.

 - One man's freedom is another man's oppression.  Freedom from religion, freedom from secularity, freedom from communism, freedom from capitalism, freedom from censorship, freedom from offensive/sacriligelous speech, and so forth.  A big part of the Nazi justification was "lebensraum" - "room to live."  They just wanted freedom to live with adequate space.

Numbered points in your post are irrelevant.

Second point - insurgents don't give a hoot about their country.  Patently and obviously false.  Really really obviously false.  They obviously care a lot about Iraq, about the region, about the religion.  You don't become a suicide bomber out of indifference.

DBibeau855 wrote: yeah, you become a suicide bomber because the government give your family money for the amount of money equivilent to 25,000 dollars

In some cases, yes.

But I don't believe that every suicide bomber was bribed/threatened.  Does anybody honestly believe that?

Conviction, and lots of it, is an obvious part of what we are facing.

Not at all.  They are terrorists - because they are not on my side.

My point is that from a truly objective perspective the terms are pretty close to interchangeable or random/meaningless.

If I were on their side, then the second half of the post would describe my views and beliefs, and they would therefore be freedom fighters.

But since they are not on my side, they are evil terrorists.

Tactics are tactics.

Some ideologies attach moral values to certain tactics.  In medieval Europe, slaughtering peasants or poisoning wells was acceptable, but for one knight to take unfair advantage of another was not (or whatever).

For many years guerilla tactics were (in Europe) viewed as immoral - this changed by the mid-19th century, I believe.  Attacking civilians used to be ok, now it is not.

Tactics are tactics, but ideologies change.  Terrorism used to be perfectly acceptable in many contexts (although the word/label was rarely popular); now we (Europe/N.A.) frown upon it.  Others obviously currently attach a different moral value to terrorism than we do.

By point is that there is nothing inherent in what the insurgents/terrorists/freedom fighters are doing that "we" would not deem/have not deemed acceptable in different times and places.  there is nothing they are doing that "we" have not also done at some point.

The terrorists are (a) not us, and (b) employing tactics that we currently find distasteful.  The same sentence can be applied to us from the perspective of the terrorists.  This thing is entirely a matter of perspective and current moral values in the societies involved.

What, then, of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (and countless similar attacks throughout history).

Does not that make the US a terrorist in 1945 (be quiet, people) and evil (I said be quiet)?  We clearly targeted civilians for the express purpose of terrorizing the enemy.