"Palme D'Or" for Mike Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11&

[kandrathe]

Hm, okay, let's put it this way: During the "official" War Hussein used all his military arsenal to defend his Dictatorship but he did not use a single Weapon of Massdestruction. Now those who resist the US Forces in Iraq today use guerillia tactics including car bombing the own people, still no one uses poison gas or anything the like. If there are realy any supplies of those materials, don't you think those people would know where to find them and would use that knowledge to obtain and use them? I mean they are not afraid to decapitate hostages but don't use more "effective" means to make foreign forces withdraw?
To back this up, I served some time with the German Anti-Chemical Warfare Unit until just a few days before the attacks on Iraq started and what I learned there was that the Iraqis could not even drive a pickup truck to the next village without being tracked and that is just the information that was passed to our unit...so my guess is that US Headquaters knew just about everything that happened there.

Good. Then you know that it is possible that Saddam was not prepared for the invasion or the speed of the attack, and that as a general rule you do not store chemical or biological weapons in a ready to use state. You store the precursors and mix them up just before you use them. I believe most of those chemicals were trucked to Syria in the weeks prior to the war in an attempt to thwart Hans Blix's team.

Well, exactly my point but the two of us seem to come to different conclusions. While I think in a country that is based on law and order, which, if my memory serves me right, is true for both the US and Germany, the solution ought to be to enable the police to respond more quickly to deal with "homocidal maniacs" rather then providing the population with firearms to take the law into the own hands. Well this seems to be matter of different attitude and i guess this can not be resolved by arguments.

People in the US have been calling for more law and order for decades, and in response we have more people incarcerated that any nation on the planet. We also have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to defend ourselves with guns if we like. But, you entirely side-stepped my argument that the problem was drug use, and not firearm use.

You can't be serious about that. Do you realy think that drug addiction and assorted crime is any different in the US then in any other western country?

Amphetamine Use (methamphetamine, amphetamine and substances of the ecstasy group)
It was estimated that there were 24 million users of amphetamines in the world in the late 1990s. Of these, 58% lived in the Americas(3), 14% in Western Europe, 11% in Africa, 10% in Asia, 5% in Eastern Europe and 3% in Oceania. They represent 2.9% of Oceania's population, 0.8% in Western Europe, 0.7% in Asia, 0.5% (each) in the Americas and Africa, and 0.4% in Eastern Europe.

Of the estimated 4.5 million users of ecstasy, 51% lived in Western Europe, 27% in North America, 9% in Oceania, 7% in Eastern Europe, 4% in Asia, 2% in Africa and less than 1% in South America. These users represented 1.6% of Oceania's population aged 15 and over, 0.6% in Western Europe, 0.4% in North America, 0.1% in Eastern Europe, 0.02% in Africa, 0.01% in South America and 0.01% in Asia.

Heroin Use
Of the estimated 9.2 million heroin users in the world, 61% lived in Asia, 15% from Europe, 13% from the Americas(4), 6% in Oceania and 5% in Africa. These represent between 0.12 % and 0.22% of the population of these continents.

Cocaine Use
Of the estimated 14 million cocaine users in the world, 50% lived in North America, 22% in South America, 16% in Western Europe, 9% in Africa and 1% (each) lived in Asia, Oceania and Eastern Europe. Those users represented 2.2% of the population aged 15 and over in North America, 1.1% of the population in South America, 0.9% in Oceania, 0.7% in Western Europe, 0.3% in Africa, 0.04% in Eastern Europe and 0.01% in Asia.
Canadian DOJ: Drug Use and Offending by: Nathalie Quann, Research Analyst

United Nation: Office on Drugs and Crime -- Global Illicit Drug Trends
Americans are 4 times as likely to use Amphetamines, and Methamphetamines, and 3 times more likely to use Cocaine or Crack. Europeans are more likely to use Marijuana or Ecstasy. I am saying that the drugs that are used by Americans induce more violence. Americans patterns of drug abuse might also be different.

The court's decision to stop the recount in Florida is a fact and no matter what reason (if I remember correctly the court explanation was that it wanted to defend the "institution of the President") is something that appears to me as a very bad idea in a democracy.

The Supreme Courts argument for stopping the recount was that selective recounts in only 4 democrat counties violated the "equal protection" clause. Either the entire state needed to be recounted, or none. It was obvious that any legal recount would result in a slim Bush victory.

Although we find that the appellants are entitled to reversal in part of the trial
court's order and are entitled to a manual count of the Miami-Dade County
undervote, we agree with the appellees that the ultimate relief would require a
counting of the legal votes contained within the undervotes in all counties where
the undervote has not been subjected to a manual tabulation. Accordingly, we
reverse and remand for proceedings consistent with this opinion.  
ALBERT GORE, JR., and JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN vs KATHERINE HARRIS, as Secretary, etc., et al.

All members of the Bin Laden familiy that were inside the US on September 11th were flown back to Saudi-Arabia without being questioned at all, thats a fact.

9/11 Commission Report - Page 329

During my time in Kuwait I discussed the orders on how to interrogate prisoners with friends from the US forces. There was even a leaflet from Mr. Rumsfeld featuring such nice things as keeping prisoners awake for extended periods of time, hold them in "uncomfortable" positions for extended periods of time, exposing them to extreme noise, threatening them with guard dogs, blindfolding them or combinations of the above to gain information. Interestingly this leaflet made it as far as the german newspaper "Stern" which featured a copy of it in April or May this year.

Many of the detainee's in Abu Garib and Guantanamo are not POW's, so in a strict legal sense the GC does not apply. They should be treated humanely, but I disagree that they should not be aggressively interrogated. We are not fighting the Boy Scouts here, many of these people are ruthless terrorists. I would prefer we could all act civilized, but we need to realistically look at who we are dealing with here. Unfortunately, Abu Garib happened, and that was a mistake -- those responsible are being held accountable.

Me and my fellow Euopeans do not like to rely on distortions as we learned from our history that it is a bad idea. So there is a scary tendency to question the things we are told, no matter what source they are coming from. Following that tendency and while not agreeing on some conclusions Moore draws, after seeing his movie I could not disprove any fact that was presented in it.

And, yet it is obvious to me that you did not read the 9/11 commission report. So from where do you get your facts?

Edit: US Supreme Court admonishes the Florida Supreme Court for trying to rewrite election law after the election.