Exactly

wow, who was the coward? The ragheads that cut the stewardess' throats with a box cutters and crashed jets into a buildings full of inocent men , women and children? or.....you tell me

And if you are afraid of being hit by a drunk driver perhaps you should follow the behavior you suggested earlier in referring to dealing with terror and just stay off the road and out of their way.

Papa

In my opinion the cowards were the politicians for throwing America into a frenzy over an attack by a few idiots. When the L.A. riots occurred did we go on national alert? No because we did not need to scare society into going to war.

The point I was trying to make with the drunk drivers is that I am in no way shape or form afraid of being hurt in a terrorist attack and that the media plays us into being afraid so we will say, Go Bush and support his actions.

As for staying off the road and out of a drunk's way, I will in no way shape or form alter my routine/habits out of fear, but that is just me. Sure there is a threat of being tagged by a drunk heading out to hit the river at 3:00 a.m. but that is a chance you take living life. Just like living in the most powerful Democratic and dominant Society on earth we take a chance we may piss someone off along the way. When we play the bully on the block, we are bound to get kicked in the shin once and a while.

yeah right, the media is all over supporting GWB!


GP and Wabowhunter I hope you got my backside covered :rolleyes:

Lead?????? What????Apples to apples and oranges to oranges...

I guess you're calling Rudolph Guliani a coward, John Kerry, and the Bush admin cowards.

You don't think that having airplanes taking out a couple buildings is reason for a frenzy??? Shall we wait for a Nuke to take out a city?? You should tell that to the people of NY. Now, I don't really think that Gold Bar is on anyone's hit list so you are probably safe there. As far as the LA riots were concerned. The NG was called in and the Gov at the time did issue a state of emergency and call up guard members. (Don't understand why that was even brought into the conversation) Should we go to war with California, is that you implication? As far as drunk drivers, I will be the first to tell you that they scare the hell out of me. I change plans, avoid driving and even being out on certain holidays and certain times of night due to them. I will try and take anything I can personally control that may inflict pain and hurt on my family. There has been a war going on against drunk driving for sometime now, look how the laws have changed for them. When the laws started getting stricter you were hearing a lot of the same grips you are now...Infringing on rights, govt getting into personal business....


I guess there is sort of a simularity between the two though. Neither is a situation where there will be a winner. All you can do with both is hope to contain and make it as hard as possible for either action to be accomplished. Were always gonna have drunks and there is always gonna be someone pi$$ed of at America as long as we have the ball. One more thing, there will always be some wacked out politician that thinks they have the best idea on how to resolve both...

They supported him because the media allowed Bush to twist the intelligence without questioning it.

Until recently the press did not realize that the Bush administration was lying to them.

Pamartin

Well at least Kerry and Bush.

:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Papa

They controlled the media see below:

A war story I wish I'd written
By HARVEY RICE

The realization that the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion Iraq invasion was drawing near awakened memories I had buried since covering the war. They summoned a measure of resentment, frustration and even guilt.

Those feelings were sharpened by recent revelations raising the possibility that the rationale for the war was cynically manufactured by the Bush administration from selected, wildly inaccurate intelligence.

I was a witness to, and in a sense a participant in, the most concerted, successful attempt by our government to control war coverage in our history.

And it went off with barely a whimper from the men and women of the media.

The Chronicle had sent me to Doha, Qatar, where I was to cover the war from the headquarters of U.S. Central Command at Camp as Sayliyah.

Hundreds of reporters from all over the world flocked to the $1 million press center at the base, believing that this is where they would get a daily briefing{<>} on the progress of the war.

Reporters with combat units could only view a fragment of the story. The press briefers at Central Command would give the overview.

At least that's what everyone thought.

Reality intruded the day the war began. I was among a mob of reporters watching the opening salvos of the war on a bank of television sets in the press center.

I turned to the press officer nearest me, who was surrounded by reporters peppering him with questions. "No comment," he told incredulous reporters."We don't want to endanger the troops."

Could he at least acknowledge that the war had begun?

"No comment."

When it was pointed out that we were watching the invasion of Iraq on television, he was unmoved.

Gradually, it dawned on me that the military had herded us into the press center so that we could be kept away from information.

The press center was sealed off from the rest of the base, and access was controlled by armed guards. A reporter's contact with military personnel of any rank was {<>}controlled by a press officer.

All military personnel, except the press officers, were restricted to the base, so there was no opportunity, as in past wars, for reporters to meet officers or enlisted men for candid appraisals of the fighting as it unfolded.{<>}

The entire anti-information campaign was run by a Texan named Jim Wilkinson, a Republican political operative who once worked for former U.S. Rep. Dick Armey.

Wilkinson, now communications deputy for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, was one of a score of Republican operatives who descended on Florida during the balloting recount in the 2000 presidential campaign. Wilkinson also helped sell the impression that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet."

Despite his penchant for desert camouflage uniforms and military jargon, Wilkinson, a civilian, was essentially a political commissar who controlled information about the war as if he were running{<>} an election campaign.

His assignment was to keep the operation "on message."

Wilkinson once called a{<>} staff meeting to praise the 42 press officers for keeping reporters away from news of any sort, one of the press officers revealed.

Of the daily news briefing at the base, Kevin Diaz, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said, "It was a political briefing from beginning to end. They never intended to give us the X's and the O's."

Michael Wolff, a columnist for New York magazine, drew hearty applause from reporters when he asked Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, one of the command's chief spokesmen, during a briefing why we should attend when so little information was forthcoming.

Every reporter I knew concurred with the evaluation of the press center that appeared in Wolff's next column: "It takes about 48 hours to understand that information is probably more freely available at any other place in the world than it is here.

"At the end of the 48 hours, you realize that you know significantly less than when you arrived, and that you're losing more sense of the larger picture by the hour. Eventually, you'll know nothing."

The contrast with the British military spokesmen was profound. They readily gave me and other reporters as many details as they could verify about British clashes with Iraqi units. U.S. press officials steadfastly refused to give a shred of information about American units outside the briefings.

"In reality, we had two different styles of news media management," Group Capt. Al Lockwood, the British army spokesman at Central Command, told the Guardian newspaper. "I feel fortunate to have been part of the U.K. one."

The British gave me one of my few scoops, admitting that an uprising in Iraqi-held city of Basra had fizzled.

Wilkinson waited until three days after the war began before throwing out a few scraps of information.

On the afternoon of the third day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the man in charge of running the war, gave the first briefing to a press corps thirsting for news.

They were disappointed. Franks spoke in generalities and gave little information about the progress of the invasion.

"All in this room should remain convinced that what we say from this podium -- myself or my staff -- or what we say from the various press centers associated with this coalition, will be absolute truth as we know it," Franks told us.

Yet he began the briefing with a half-truth.

The United States had entered its second war with Iraq without the support of the United Nations and with a much smaller coalition than the first war. In a clear attempt to hype the perception of support for the war, Franks told the briefing that 52 nations were represented at Central Command.

He neglected to say that many of those 52 nations were supporting U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, not Iraq. And many of them were stridently opposed to the invasion.

And that's where my guilt comes in.

In retrospect, I realize now that I should have filed a story the first day of the war saying that no information was coming from Central Command.

Although most reporters individually treated the press operation with the disdain it so richly deserved, there were no stories revealing it for what it was.

There were no publishers making angry phone calls to the Pentagon or the White House -- no letters, no outrage.

In this, we all failed the American public.


Rice is a reporter for the Houston Chronicle.

Oh, I must not remember right, thanks for correcting me

I must have mixed things up... I did think that the inspectors had been met by armed gaurds, so Bush pulled them out and invaded...

As for how much safer it is here...

It is just as dangerous for you to walk down the streets now as it was 5 years ago... Just a lot more dangerous for a terrorist to walk down that street with you.

Just my two cents

Curtis

I guess they kick some more women and children in the shins in Bagdad

Goharly,

I agree with your comment about leaving Israel alone. The US's one sided support of Israel, over the years, is coming back to bite us. However, now we're in too deep to just turn away. Except to the point of considering this issue in the next election, I think the focus needs to start turning to what are we going to do now rather than reliving whether we should have gone into Iraq.....