Well, aside from all the fatuous exchange of insincerities about the fate of so many unfortunates I really do think the Bald Eagle ought to examine it's own attitudes and conduct in seeking to establish what can motivate not just one man but a whole band to throw away their lives in an attempt to spite the creature.

The US has planned or been involved in :over a hundred assassinations ; planned assassinations ; attempted assassinations ; quashing of nationalist uprisings and other military interferences in the internal affairs of other countries since WW2 and has shown little remorse or conscience in seeking to protect 'interests,' not universally regarded as lying within it's legitimate sphere, and has caused the deaths of millions in the process.

I really do find it disturbing that the occasion of the destruction of the World Trade Centre can have given rise to so much facile journalistic insincerity and meaningless flattery of the insistence of the US that it stands for freedom and democracy against criminals and tyrants etc: if such persons can be motivated to throw away their own lives, how much concern is one supposed to imagine they might have for tens, hundreds of thousands even millions of other lives. It was precisely such insistence that the other fellow is always completely to blame that caused such bitterness over the treaty of Versailles and filled the Germans with a terrible resolve for vengeance in the 1930's.

In Israel and Palestine, Taiwan and China, all over Africa and arguably in every continent millions of poorly paid individuals in various armed forces and paramilitary groupings have hardly had time to goggle over the democratic concepts involved in the manner in which the latest US president was elected. It has been said that Osama Bin Laden was outraged at the US interference in the Gulf on behalf of the Kuwaitis and that this was his motivation for the recent attacks on American Embassies in which hundreds of innocent bystanders were killed, as well as for the attack on the World Trade. The fact is that The US armed both Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden when their 'terrorist' activities were deemed to coincide with US strategy for maintaining it's stranglehold over the world's economies: Hussein was to be a bulwark against militant Islam in the region and Bin Laden was to help push back the frontiers of the Soviet Empire. The situation whereby the US, a rebel colony and a Republic of not quite three hundred years of age can escape uncensured from describing some of the World's oldest civilisations as 'Rogue States,' without hardly a murmur fromthe so called liberal press is deeply disturbing. The people in these places are representatives of cultures which were very arguably socially advanced, highly literate and numerate, many centuries before people in Western Europe had even heard of writing let alone thought to compose written records of their own and whilst I do obviously think it is a good idea to do such things as to seek to curb the proliferation of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. I think it rather more sinister and cause for more general consternation and that persons of the known integrity and soundness of judgement of our own political leaders here in the west have access to such weapons than the possibility of their being obtained by someone else: they lied to us about the BSE crisis, what reason is their to imagine they wouldn't lie about an attack with a biological weapon ? Or even use one on their own civilians purporting it to be the work of a foreign power if it should serve some short term exigency.

What do any of those who have been ready to condemn and assume really know about the people in these places? Do they assume that their own leaders have been engaged on some benign and charitable research ? I am reliably informed that the Kuwaitis are more worthy of criticism on the basis of their attitude toward human rights and democracy than the Iraqis in many respects. The treatment of women with regard to mandatory dress tends to be more liberal in Iraq and only about 13% of the Kuwaiti population are entitled to vote. We surely know what happens to such concerns for civil liberty outside of Election time when there is no profit in the issue: not that news about anything that ever happens isn't carefully prepared for us by the media with various subliminal instructions, about what is to be considered, correct. Remember Tony BLiars' and Robin Cooks' remarks about ethical foreign policy including the record of such nations as Saudi Arabia whose friendship has become expedient: they have been imprisoning and torturing British subjects as innocent scapegoats for the Islamic militants whom the official Saudis deny the existence of? Recall Clinton's coddling of the American electorate with his cooing concerns for the Tibetans? I really do find it deeply disturbing that the shocking event of five thousand deaths can precipitate so much jingoism and suddenly transform the duplicitous, self interested image-mongers we know into patriotic heroes with self denying virtues.

I am surprised when people tell me that they don't realise that assassination remains as a legitimate tool of modern statecraft; it has been authoritatively alleged that the British recently killed a few Libyan civilians in a botched attempt on Kaddafi's life The US is no different to any other historical political/economic elite and has all the inherent strengths and weaknesses with which human nature can imbue any institution. "Empires, like men," said the Frenchman Jacques de Thou in 1604," have their beginning, their decadence, and their end!"

I am afraid that The US and the British will be perceived rather as a Classroom bully and it's sidekick who subsequent to the event of some small boy having dared to punch the bully back in the face, have decided to go round the class insisting that the act was unprovoked and unjust and demanding revenge for an act that all know was at least partly provoked or the result of the bully's aggressive behaviour without anyone actually daring to say so.

I forget what the alleged motivation/justification was the last time the US bombed Libya which it certainly did within the last decade or so from British bases but the fact of the matter is that if anyone with serious capability had decided to attack them in return for their invasion of Cuba for example, a nation with as much right to self determination as any, they would have begun a World War. This tiny nation is subjected to continual bullying by the US even today and I think we all need to seriously beware of the consequences of using might to make right in a world now full of weapons of mass destruction.

The business about the 'War on Terrorism' has largely been fashioned, in the UK by the most effective prime ministerial dictatorship outside of wartime in living memory. Neither the people or the House of Commons have been asked about, it they have been told what their wishes and actions are to be have they not? I really don't think that the occasion of the gruesome deaths of about 5000 of civilians of any nation should be the occasion for all the western leaders to be portraying themselves as good guys in white hats riding off over the range to pursue persons who are wicked, have no imaginable motive or justification for slaying themselves in this manner, or conspiring with others to slay themselves (and US civilians of course), and are rotten cowards. Such an attitude has about as much basis in reality as the Lone Ranger and is about as likely as a work of pure fiction to unearth the best explanation for the horrible event of the World Trade Centre disaster, which I am sure survivors and relatives of the survivors will feel they are owed: or indeed to the perennial problem of aggressive violence in any and every society.