I saw this and though it might help some people put the "War on Terrorism" into focus. It has nothing to do with Abortion or Christian values. That is, unless you consider making the air above Afghanistan 1000 Degrees Farenheight to be a good step towards in aborting life and totally against the "Thou Shall not Kill" commandment. Two wrongs supposedly don't make a right, and you can forget about turning the other cheek. That would be the "Christian" Thing to do. (If you cannot tell that I am joking, then you don't need to read my post's. I try not to take everybody seriously, and hope that people don't take me to be that way either.

Trigger Happy Bush administration hawks want to deploy “mini-nukes” against Osama bin Laden. by Jeffrey St. Clair How should the Pentagon get Osama bin Laden? With a discreetly placed nuke, says Rep. Steven Buyer, the right-wing congressman from northern Indiana. “Don’t send special forces in there to sweep,” Buyer told an Indianapolis TV station. “We’d be very naive to believe that biotoxins and chemical agents were not in these caves. Put a tactical nuclear device in and close these caves for a thousand years.”

Buyer doesn’t just want to kill bin Laden and his Taliban cohort. He wants to send a message to the world that America is now willing to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. “I just want the [Bush] administration to know that I think the United States needs to send a message to the world that we are prepared to do that,” he says.

During his campaigns, Buyer has relentlessly pushed his service as a Gulf War vet. He touts himself as an expert on “asymmetrical warfare,” Pentagon-speak for attacks waged on U.S. targets by terrorists using unconventional weapons. Buyer wants to smoke them out with radioactive weapons.

Admittedly, Buyer is one of the kookier members of Congress. But he is far from a lone voice. A day after the World Trade Center attacks, Sen. Robert Torricelli, the New Jersey Democrat, vowed that the United States would “unleash hell upon them.” And Buyer’s view was echoed by Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, in a radio interview on October 21. “I would never rule out tactical nuclear weapons if I thought they could do the job, and if they were needed,” King told WABC. “If the military people said we think certain chemical weapons are going to be used, we know where they are, and the only way we can stop their use is by using tactical nuclear weapons.”

Among the wizards of Armageddon, there is an almost palpable desire to see nuclear weapons put to use on the battlefield. The frail doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction has been jettisoned with the wreckage of the Soviet Union, and in its place nuclear war planners are pushing a more robust and offensive role for the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Two weeks after September 11, the Japan Times reported that Pentagon war planners had presented Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush with a scenario for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. The Tokyo newspaper quoted a Pentagon source, who said that Bush had rejected the option, fearing almost certain global backlash.

However, Rumsfeld was more circumspect when he was asked directly on ABC’s This Week whether the United States was considering the use of nuclear weapons against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “We ought to be very proud of the record of humanity, that we have not used those weapons for 55 years,” he told Sam Donaldson. “And we have to find as many ways as possible to deal with this serious problem of terrorism.”

But Rumsfeld’s cagey response was actually a significant statement that may signal a chilling shift in U.S. policy. Since the mid-’70s, the official U.S. line has been that it will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations. Rumsfeld’s deputy, the hyper-hawkish Paul Wolfowitz, has warned the Taliban that the United States will “use a very large hammer.”

In case the Taliban had trouble reading between the lines, Thomas Woodrow, a Wolfowitz pal and veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency, made the point clear in a column for the Washington Times. “At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan,” Woodrow wrote. “To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration.”

The bomb of choice seems to be low-yield nuclear weapons, the so-called bunker-buster nukes that could be used as a kind of radioactive assassination weapon, designed to knock out the leadership of hostile regimes. In this twisted logic, proponents are pushing the bomb as a humanitarian device that could save civilian lives. “We’ve seen examples as recently as the air war with Serbia, when we attacked underground targets with conventional weapons with very little effect,” said Paul Robinson, director of the Sandia National Laboratory, in a September interview with the National Journal. “It just takes far too many aircraft sorties and conventional weapons to give you any confidence that you can take out underground bunkers. By putting a nuclear warhead on one of those weapons instead of high explosives, you would multiply the explosive power by a factor of more than a million.”

There’s another reason the nuclear hawks are pushing the idea of shifting the U.S. nuclear arsenal toward the low-yield nukes: They can develop new weapons without (in their minds, at least) violating the non-proliferation treaty. “We would neither have to conduct testing nor redesign for such a weapon, because we have them already,” Robinson said. “We could develop these lower-yield weapons without forcing the nuclear testing issue back onto the table, with a richer database of past tests, and at relatively low cost.”

It seems very unlikely that the United States would use nuclear weapons against the Taliban. However, the nuclear hawks and their allies in the bomb-making industries seem to have succeeded in exploiting the war in an effort to breathe life (and billions of dollars) a new generation of nuclear weaponry.

-- Bill (Bill@bill.com), November 05, 2001

Answers

The commandment is " Thou shalt not murder"....and no, I do not support what our country is doing in Afgahnistan.

-- Laura (LadybugWrangler@hotmail.com), November 05, 2001.

I really think that we have already been using the "bunker busters". I recall reading an article on it shortly after we had begun bombing in Afghanistan.

It seems rather likely that there is going to be nuclear activity here, as now even the high level guys are saying they have reason to believe that "operatives" on the ground here in the US have some of the 132 missing suitcase nukes.

I'm not for what we are doing there at all. I do realize that this is all part of a larger plan. Also, I do believe that there must be an attempt to respond to the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon...I just don't believe what we are doing is is the proper response. And yes, I do have other ideas, but they are too logical for governmental folks and wouldn't help to progress the agenda.

-- Doreen (bisquit@here.com), November 05, 2001.

Laura - Read number 6 - I guess you are wrong.

1. I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

3. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

5. Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long.

6. Thou shalt not kill.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

8. Thou shalt not steal.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.

-- Jason (jason@patrick.com), November 07, 2001.

Jason, the original Hebrew word was "murder." I'm not going to drag out the Hebrew translation and the Strong's Concordance and Oxford Dictionary of the Church and the rest of the pile of booksbecause the sun is shining today and I want to go out and play.

-- Laura (LadybugWrangler@hotmail.com), November 07, 2001.

.....but I am glad you know the commandments. :)

-- Laura (LadybugWrangler@hotmail.com), November 07, 2001.