Yes, but in my opinion the life of 1 American GI is worth more than the 23 million of them.

Skydriftin......I doubt any of the GI's you refer to would agree.....and I suspect the ratio of people benefiting from each GI's sacrifice far exceeds numbers which are calculable.

Skydriftin, freeing 23 million people was just a by-product of disarming a dangerous kook. We needed to go in and "nip him at the bud" before we had another 9/11 or worse.

If the loss of 1 American G.I. is not accpetable for this cause, what cause do you think is acceptable for Americans to die for?

read my post at the top of the page

you right people... i am a bully for telling people that are advocating violence against other americans, that i will give them money to try. it just shows that the same people who advocate violence are usually tha last to back up what they say? and no i am not mistaking my wallet for my balls. I will donate the proceeds to a steelhead charity. and after i take your money, i might even give it to washington trout just to piss you off further . now is there any takers or just talkers?

anglin- you are right... sporties(in general) are the biggest bunch of talkers out there. i really see what you were saying in your last post.


ps. more than a 100 soldiers fighting in the gulf right now along with thousands of police officers are safer in their jobs right now due to the martial arts training that i have taught them! what have you rednecks taught them? beat up poachers if ya have to but going after the people in your country for simply disagreeing with you is basically doing the terrorists job for them. "walk softly but carry a big stick" well in america we carry a big stick.....we still need to learn to walk softly!

Chappy,
Now there is a poll Id like to see.
Does a soldier feel safer with martial arts training or his M16???
I bet I could guess the answer to that one.

Nothing like a good intentional misspelling to liven up the conversation...eh?

duroboat-ask him when he loses his m16

aunty em- are you for real? you sound like a very angry and disturbed person. your right you getting soldiers druck is much more patriotic than my training them! what are you? a brothel or a human?

Chappy-
Do you really intend for your posts to sound as bad as they do when we read them? Honestly, your posts make you sound like an a$$. I really doubt your anything close to this abrasive in person. You might even be a nice guy. I understand your passion for your ideas, but when you express them, your tone repels people from your side of an issue. We all have had pissy posts (myself included) but yours always have a negative, "I'll kick your A$$" spin on them. Theres really no place or need for that here.

Ah....just one more good reason for getting rid of Saddam.

The News We Kept to Ourselves-NYT
By EASON JORDAN


TLANTA — Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the
government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with
Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw
and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would
have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad
staff.

For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For
weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of
a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's
ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq
station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the
world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have
gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.

Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no
protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international
press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate
reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared
and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and
tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in
the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.

We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our
payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son,
Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his
brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King
Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have
responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant
in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior
officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such
official has long been missing all his fingernails).

Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did
so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few
months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon
killed.

I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me
that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry
officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been
executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter
of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told
me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and
told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be
paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these
men said to us.

Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that
we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned
me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead,
and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had
thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped
confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents
who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A.
and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on
camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.

Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless
still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by
Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which
included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months,
forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led
offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A
plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her
family's home.

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam
Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more
gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these
stories can be told freely.

Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.

elk run- i understand what you are saying but why is negative and conservative "normal posts" and anything negative or positive from a liberal perspective "agitator" or "pissy" i was not the one saying they were going to beat up protestors. i just said where they could find one. too many out there mistake their wallet for their balls. All i did was call them on it. and like aunty em did you read right over the debate part? its pure hypocricy. I dont go arounfd fighting or mad or picking fights . all I have done is respond in kind to those who have! but I am the guilty one cuz im the one liberal not the thousand conservatives! why is it that you cant write anything from an environmental perspective or long term perspective without being attacked personally but people can spew venomouse anti anything good statements and its just another post. i am realizing that most of these board members are the exact problem that they blame the indians or govt or commercial guys for. if native killing, peace hating, river draining, clear cutting rednecks hate me than all the better. If they want to hurt protestors I would rather they get their energy out on me than some young kid or my mom or someone else that is anti-war. there are times that one needs to reduce themselves to the level of the conversation in order to make a point. dont blame me for sinking to that level. blame the level of conversation.

Good Post Little Fish-

Chappy- No-one including myself wants to beat up protesters, so your comments are misguided. The intent of the post was to make a point, nothing more. Read a little more carefully next time.

AuntyM-

You are right, I usually do speak up when threats of physical harm arise, mostly because I think they are epitome of cyber-stupid.

In the context of this thread though I figure it made better sense just to let it go...they are doing an adequate job of exposing the stupidity of such statements without my help.

If one guys says 'punch 'em in the nose' and then says 'I was just joking' that kind of already starts the whole thing down the wrong road IMO, joking or not. It sets up the next guy to say "I'll punch you in the nose (insert appropriate icons) hahaha, I was joking too"...

On an interpersonal level, this whole thread is a mirror for American foreign policy.

Just like our friend 'T' Aunty, the chapster would do well to take all of this BB stuff less personally. Hehehehe....still working on that myself here and there.

very true h2o . i really dont take this as seriousely as people think. i am usually having a laugh when I write the radical stuff. I guess i am having a little "andy kaufman style fun" but my whole point is dont say stuff about beating up protestors from the safety of your keyboard if you dont really mean it. i am not really a rich a$$. that $2,000 is actually the entire sum of my bank account right now but i wanted to show that there are people like myself that walk sofly (yes I really do walk softly) and carry a big stick that will take you up on your offer. And I dont believe that anyone was truley kidding about punching protestors. its happening alot. of course, there are many protestors that are acting way out of line as well with painting cars and disrupting traffic.

Chappy-
I'm going to have to disagree with you. I did read the debate part, and I still think you are being too assertive here. Its not a liberal conservative thing at all. I have heard some pretty good cases made by both sides of several issues on this board without it degenerating to threats.
I have heard many say that the US needs to not act as the police for the entire world, such is the case with you here. You dont need to draw the venom from others here in order to protect the weak. Its not that serious.
Again, I'm sure that you're a decent enough guy. You seem passionate about fishing and the environment. It is also a possibility that people are misreading the tone of your posts, as often happens with this type of communication. But, I'd venture a guess that if it doesn't tone down, you wont be posting here much longer. Later.

AuntyM,
If you are going to be the referee, at least call the game with some semblance of fairness. You missed the first three or four fouls. Vic admitted he was being a smart ___. Where are the rest of them? Read the first few responses. If you lean too far to the starboard, you will get all wet.

aunty im trying to find some common ground here and you are continuing with insults and personal attacks.
elkrun- why should i get kicked off when so many are writing so much more forcefull, aggressive, assertive comments than I. the only difference I see is that those are coming from the conservative perspective. people e-mail me all the time and tell me that i am going to get kicked off. I hope they dont kick me off but i think that would only be censorship if they do and will only serve to limit the scope of diversity and strength in the fishing communtity. disagreement fuels learning. remember hitler tried to create a society where everyone thought the same . so did sadamm. no dissenting opinion in iraq was allowed. is this board going to be built to look like america , with all sorts of views ...or iraq? I am passionate about what i believe in and one thing I have learned is that unpassionate people dont do anything. both ghandi and martin luther king were thought of as very angry, passionate people when they were in their respective movements. now they are known as champions of peace. George
Washington didnt cross the delaware out of happiness. like I said. I am sure that i get misinterpretted (i do type a lil fast sometimes and forget to correct stuff) but i am not raging or unhappy when i write that stuff. If you go back thru my posts, i think they would only be over the top to people who have made personal attacks against me or against other americans for protesting. If I am wrong in that than i would say it was misinterpretation or maybe i had too much coffe that day. the fact is I dont feel like writing post in response to everything i agree with , I end up writing them about things i disagree with. but we all agree on so much that it seems like preachin to the choir to only discuss what we all agree on. where we will learn and grow stronger as a fishing community is by discussing our disagreements. and I would like to discuss disagreements without being personally attacked every time I do.

Sky-Guy,

Just think how much more server disk space and access bandwidth, Bob would have for this site if you hadn't started this topic in the first place.

It was CLEARLY volatile, and inflammatory, and has served NO useful purpose that I can ascertain! (except to arouse AuntyM's ire! :p You go girl! )

Where's David Jackson and the dead horse when you need him!

Might I suggest that next time, a lighter philosophical discussion may be in order. Creationism vs. Evolution perhaps...

Chappy,
I was talking about the real world not TV ,movie, or fantasy land. I dont think to many soldiers lose there weapons And if they did I dont think the enemy would drop there AK-47's to fight hand to hand. Try to remember that this is not the karate kid or kung fool grasshopper. WAX ON WAX OFF

why do the soldiers get that training then? do you know better than the generals now too? trust me when your rifle jams, you want every back up system you have. doesnt this just show the level that you guy drop to to try and find fault with me? write the pentagon if you dont like the training. what do airforce pilots need boots for? they are up in planes arent they? come on! lets keep this on a real level