I agree with you, dude, honestly. They have a right to lay down and die if they choose to and we don't have to play along. the vehnement isn't a perjorative to me. It just means beyond strong. You are acting strongly, and in the US favor. I have no problem with that at all, and actually concur. Keep fighting the good fight, but please take heed of celebrims warning. We may have to fight alone, but it'd be nice to have people allied with us(note I said nice, not necessary).

Hey, sorry man, but them's the breaks. I've spent the last ten years of my life in college towns in Nor California where everything you said holds true. I've been knocked down in stairwells, been shoved out into the street near a busy freeway exit in Davis,Ca, had a campus cinmea showing halted as people yelled at me so others couldn't watch the film, had rocks thrown my apt. windows, and a whole host of other bs. Your preaching to the choir on this one. BUt in the end, when these places sucked because of adherence to leftist policies it was because I couldn't convince enough people that they were wrong. It's an utterly unfair battle. Maybe hopeless. But in the end, when history looks at it, the 'you didn't convince enough people' line is very aporopriate. It sucks. Trust me. I grew up in what many consider the last conservative bastion in California(Orange County, from behind the Orange Curtain), and it's going to seed because I, when I go back to visit, can't convince enough people that socialist policies don't work. Yeah, empiricism doesn't work often. So what. If you care you fight the fight. Sorry that your country isn't going the way you want. I wish it was. But, in the end, it is YOUR country. What happens there, since Spain is a country governed at the consent of the governed, is up to YOU. I have to fight these ideological fights every bleedin' day. Today at group meeting someone started the 'Bush is a Facist' argument, an argument I've fought in this same group twice before, and I did it again since there are impressionable undergrads that just joined the research group(my wife smacked me when we came home and is making me sleep on the couch for it too). Would my life be easier? Would I have lower blood pressure? Would I be happier? Too f'n right. So don't whine. Fight for what you believe, and don't blame me.

I am vehement because I, like Celebrim, want to knock people's teeth out when they pronounce their conclusions from false premises. Nothing cures solipsism like a precision-aimed brick in the face. But I'd rather hit them in the brain. It basically boils down to Philosophy 101. A girl gets raped. Is is because she wore a mini-skirt (determinism) or because the rapist is a sick bastard (free will)? Spain has chosen to be the girl in the mini-skirt that blames herself.

Judging from your post you are a professor at college. Can you recommend any US university for a poor Slovak national to come to and do his Masters in International Relations/Political Science at? ;) (Also, what are the general requirements to get into a Masters degree at a US university?) Thanks!

Man, this is a hard topic. I remember 9/11, like other thinking, feeling Americans. I remember where I was, what I was doing as it ocurred. I remember being away from my family, and that tore me apart too. (They needed me, for comfort if nothing else, but I had a job to do, troops to train - troops that even now are 'facing the elephant'.) I was watching Law and Order, Special Victims Unit the other night - 'tis my wifes fav show! They had an interesting case about a skeleton found in Hells Kitchen, which was missing a hand. They had found the hand 3 years ago in the rubble of the WTC. (It ended up being a murder, with a sick attempt to cover it up by making the victim a terrorism victim, rather than a victim of a crime of passion.) At one point in the show the CSI lab folks are talking about the identification process from Ground Zero - hundreds of thousands of body parts having been collected and analyzed, and identified was mentioned. It's just T.V. - but it had a feeling of reality to it, and the feelings I felt that day hit me again. I could well imagine the carnage. I wasn't "there" though I (as a feeling, thinking American) was there, as AK says. We all were. None of us can, of course, feel or know what a person who was really, physically there, is feeling. I wish, on the one hand, that the horror had been fully shown - that Americans who have allowed themselves to forget, might remember. but then I think, wow. I can NEVER forget. how can these people forget with what we DID see??? So, as I said it's a tough subject. would the viewing of the true horror have helped to keep this event in peoples minds? Or would it have just sickened and weakened our resolve? I don't know. Like I said, I for one am glad I didn't see the full horror. E.

""911 didn't feature a lot of mutilation."" "There speaks someone who wasn't there. " I was a mile away. I was there for the long convoys of ambulances at mustered at St. Vincents Hospital, and on the West Side Highway, that never got the order to move because there weren't the expected number of injuries. I gave part of the blood that was discarded because there were no patients to give it to. The Navy mobilized a hospital ship- it wasn't needed. I'm not saying there was no trauma, there were a number of horrific third degree burn cases. But these were relatively few. The body parts that were examined in Staten Island were for the most part, small. Thirty thousand people walked away, most of three thousand were simply and literally turned into ash, and a meager few needed hospitalization. At the end of a month, there were only a few dozen in hospitals. This was, except for a very unfortunate few on the fringes, a situation of either being safe, or being cremated.

It was not my intention to drive back to your memory all the pain you felt in 9/11 (I had my ration of pain too, I have friends in NYC and for two days I had no news from them, luckily they were fine). If that has been the result of my post, I'm sorry, I do apologize. It was not my intention to justify what happened in Spain last Sunday. I was already shocked, angry and humiliated, since last elections I'm ashamed too. Those opportunists are now in power and I have to live with that, fearing what they'll do to my country. My intention was to point out the devastating effect in civilians of showing the "disasters of the war" on prime time TV news. I hope that somebody will do something about media coverage in other countries, I'm not sure that something similar to what happened in Spain could not happen in other countries.

Tercio - don't think anyone is chastising you in any way for being revolted by the way the meida revels in the gore of terror attacks. At the same time, you need to know that those views that will be with you now forever are very important. you must use them to strengthen your resolve to fight terror where ever it lives. None of us want those images dredged up on a daily basis, but it is important to remember them; remember the dead, with honor. remember the terrorists who caused the horror with a view to final and irrevocable justice. The only good terrorist is a dead one. Make it so. E.

Maybe touched a raw nerve there. Still I don't accept the reasoning, it's BS. As an illustration: I could do something similar I could blame YOU personally because you just didn't convince enough people to stop Clinton from: - Giving North Korea nuclear technology. - Giving China acces to advanced weapon technology. I could also blame you personally for the Spanish election results. You should have convinced more Spaniards to vote for the right party. (AK made the effort to wrote an open letter to the Spanish, Did you do the same?) http://www.strategypage.com/messageboards/messages/93-3952.asp Heck I could even blame you personally for the Rwanda genocide because you just didn't convince enough people from Rwanda no to kill each other. Of course you could answer that I'm just an European hypocrit and that I would be just as guilty as you according to my reasoning and you would be right. Yet that wouldn't have refuted my points that all this happened because ultimately you didn't convince enough people. So you wouldn't be off the hook. With that kind of reasoning I can blame anyone for anything (as long as I'm willing to consider myself just as guilty). Blame for the Spanish turnaround in the war on terror lies on the shoulders of those Spaniards who voted leftist.

True enough. And after reading some of the posts on this thread, I apologize for what I said about Spain needing another bombing to wake them up. It would be far more effective to catch the bastards before they get a chance to pull off another. I watched the documentary "9-11" filmed by two French photographers a few months ago. They may or may not have excised the blood and gore from that before it was released on DVD--doesn't matter. While one of the photographers was inside the North Tower, you will occasionally hear rhythmic bangs from the outside. The firefighters are telling each other to be careful outside--the bangs are people hitting the ground after jumping from the 90th or 105th floor. That mere fact hits harder than the sight of a destroyed human body. That movie should be required viewing for college history courses. Instead we get "historical" movies like "Year of the Pig." Why China wants to be a superpower is beyond me. They'll just get blamed for everything that goes wrong.