Attack Afghanistan?

Yes ... says Kenneth Smillie

WHAT the world witnessed on September 11 in New York and Washington was horrific. My first thought was that we should kill the evil people who organised the attack. That, initially, was what everybody thought, except for certain bleeding heart do-gooders.

We can't imagine what it would have been like for the innocent people on those aeroplanes. They knew they were going to die. It's enough to tear your guts out, and make you want to tear the perpetrators to pieces.

To get into the minds of the suicide bombers is impossible. Unlike them, we respect life very highly: it's the only true, God-given gift we have.

I still believe that military retaliation is right, as long as it is aimed at the guilty people.

If America decides that military action is the way to go, then I will back them all the way. Indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan would not work. In the northern part of that country are freedom fighters who want stable, reasonable government.

But if US forces can target the perpetrators in a certain area of Afghanistan, they should go ahead.

All we want is revenge. Call it what you like, but that is what it is: revenge for what has been done to all those innocent people.

The terrorists would take it as a sign of weakness if we did nothing. Their outlook on life has no sense of weakness or kindness. If you give them an inch they will take a mile. Failing to take strong action will encourage them.

The longer they are around the more chance they have to do something else. They have proved that already. They bombed two American embassies in Africa and bombed the World Trade Centre before, and now they do this.

Military force is sometimes necessary to overcome evil. I know that. In the last war, I parachuted over enemy lines on D-Day. These people have the potential to be worse than Hitler unless they are stopped.

Knowing the Americans, they're going to sort this thing out. They're going to think it through and somehow go in.

The attack has to come as a surprise; they must use stealth, playing the same game as the terrorists.

The United States is pretty much on the mark in targeting Osama bin Laden. There doesn't seem another organisation recently that has been in a position to do it. It's got to be bin Laden, and possibly his friends in the Taliban: that organisation to me is evil.

Terrorists hiding in other countries should be hunted down and put on trial. If found guilty they should face the death penalty, in those countries which have it, or life imprisonment with hard labour elsewhere.

We have enough problems with the drug dealers and the football hooligans without terrorism.

We must defeat these terrorists otherwise our lives are not going to be worthwhile.

No ... says Roger Westmoreland

LAST night's news was full of the same inexcusable language being used to justify US 'retaliation'. 'The Taliban, still defiant, still refusing to hand over bin Laden'. Any mention of US 'retaliation' is an abuse of the English language. Retaliation is that which occurred on Tuesday, September 11, any military action by the US will be a furtherance of previous aggression.

The truth is that the fanatics at present governing Afghanistan have offered to hand bin Laden to a neutral country if evidence of his involvement is made available to them.

That is reasonable, that should take the heat out of the situation. But no, the US has found a country it can bomb and humiliate and truth is no mediator.

This disgusting New Labour Government, for ever on its knees to the hardliners at the White House, will back whatever crazy world war scenario Bush and his hawkish accomplices conceive.

They know that those countries whose nationals are genuinely involved in the New York and Washington outrages cannot be terrorised because they are already in the pocket of Western big business.

The CIA trained bin Laden and they put the Taliban in power and kept them there just as surely as they did Saddam Hussein and a score of other tyrannical dictators before him. The White House now says Iraq can be implicated in the 'outrages'. Well isn't that fortunate? Just when Bush and his poodles at Westminster were running out of excuses for continuing ten and a half years of bombing and humiliating the Iraqi people.

More than 100,000 tons of bombs and missiles with the explosive power of eight Hiroshimas have already reduced Iraq to a Third World country.

Who among the millions now crying for 5,000 victims in the US shed a tear for the one and a half million slaughtered in Iraq?

Why is it that guided missiles flying into Iraqi office blocks or Serbian bridges are treated so much more lightheartedly by the media than are those flown into the World Trade Centre or Pentagon?

Why should two or three buildings in Manhattan be so much more important than the 25,000 pulverised in and around Baghdad?

A war against terrorism is an impossibility. The US and its lackeys identify as terrorists only those who oppose US financial interests.

New 'terrorists' are created every day by fresh excesses in US foreign policy. Aggression by Bush and his accomplices will obviously recruit more volunteers prepared to die rather than tolerate the West's 'New World order'.

Had any nation the courage to seek extradition of the American perpetrators of mass terror in Iran, Serbia, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Nicaragua, the evidence against them is well documented in an International War Crimes Tribunal judgement from way back in February, 1992.

Updated: 10:33 Thursday, September 20, 2001