As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938)

 
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we most not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.


This declaration (above) was made by US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, America's senior representative at the 1945 Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the tribunal's chief prosecutor.

 
Europeans, and assuredly the French, like to believe that the tremulous age of Europe makes them proof against the jejune lunging of the young United States. I see blessed little evidence of it. But there is something appalling in the boobish anti-civilization now eagerly embraced by America.

Much of our noisy patriotism is not readily distinguished from the bad temper of congenitally hostile louts. We have a president who probably thinks Oat Cuisine is something one feeds to horses. I'm not sure that, before we put our own house in order, we are a position to look down too scornfully on the French.

Fred Reed

 
Many Iraqis are happy at Saddam's removal but have made clear they want U.S. troops to leave as soon as possible.

"To America and its allies we say: where are your honey-sweet promises? Now is the time to fulfill them," Sheikh Ahmad al-Issawi said in a sermon at Baghdad's Abdel-Qader Kilani mosque.

"Where is the government?" he asked. "Install a government as quickly as possible even if it is an emergency government.

"Maintain security and protect public and private possessions from looters and get public services, water and electricity, back to normal," Issawi added.

 
At Home, No Superpower

By Ruth Rosen, AlterNet
May 1, 2003

To most of us, national security means protection from external enemies – other countries or terrorists. But there is another kind of national security – the well-being of a country's citizens.

So how do we rank in terms of our domestic national security?

Poorly.

Consider American mothers and their children. Among other industrialized nations, we have the highest rates of maternal and child poverty. The mortality rate of our children under the age of 5 is shared by Croatia and Malaysia. We are 54th when it comes to access to health care for women and children. And only four other industrial countries fail to guarantee paid leave from work to new mothers.

In other words, when it comes to mothers and children, we don't even rank among the top 10.

 
Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.

'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.'

 
"The Saddam Hussein regime in the early years of his rule was the best regime in the Arab world," Iraqi teacher Abdallah Haris, 52, tells RIA Novosti. "But this regime," pointing to nearby American tanks, "is no good from the start. No jobs, no electricity, no water, no safety".

 
This is the first and most likely the last biblical quote you'll ever see here....but it just seemed sort of appropriate:

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
(Proverbs 16:18)

 
— BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The retired general overseeing Iraq's postwar reconstruction said on Wednesday that his fellow Americans should beat their chests with pride at having toppled Saddam Hussein without destroying the country's assets.

"We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: 'Damn, we're Americans!'," Jay Garner told reporters, saying that Iraq's oil fields and other infrastructure survived the war almost intact.

Garner, who was speaking after talks with visiting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad, took the media to task for emphasizing anti-American demonstrations and dissent in the wake of the three-week U.S. led war that deposed Saddam.---

 
We do not ignore the sufferings of the Jews throughout history. And in exchange, we hope the Israelis will not turn their backs on the sufferings of the Palestinians.
MAHMOUD ABBAS, Palestinian prime minister.

 
[source: Jakarta Post, 04/22/2003]
TWO ECONOMISTS IN INDONESIA DETAILED THE DEPTH OF THE DOLLAR COLLAPSE,
AND CALLED FOR INDONESIA TO BREAK ITS DEPENDENCE ON THE DOLLAR.

Titled: "Should Indonesia rely on the US Dollar?,"
Imam Nur Azis and Jason Meade from the Center for Indonesian Reform,
Jakarta, and both graduates of Leeds University in the UK,
said the dollar would "remain weak over the next decade at least, for a number of reasons."

These include:

the U.S.'s "enormous budget deficits
which are being financed by taking on new debt;"
the mass of borrowings of the government
is "not intended to finance anything productive
or positively beneficial to the United States...,
[but] is being spent on increased defense and homeland security related initiatives;"
the Bush tax cut proposals, whose "repayment will come
either in the form of further government cutbacks,
or increased taxes, or both.
Whatever the final formula, the outcome will be the same
-- a severe reduction in the economic health
of the average American consumer
and of the national economy generally."

The authors point to the collapsing university education,
due to both the increased costs caused by collapsing
state government revenues, and the harrassment
of foreign students by the new anti-terror laws.

The article concludes: "The U.S. economy is the pillar on
which the strength of the dollar rests. Without the economy,
the dollar will be of little value. Therefore, it is quite prudent
for the Indonesian government to reexamine the wisdom of its
reliance on the dollar. As Vice President Hamzah Haz has noted,
the switch from the U.S. dollar to the Euro ought not to be
carried out for political reasons, but there are definitely sound
economic reasons to question the future strength of the dollar."

 
---while SARS is new and frightening, its impact, so far, has been minor. In a mild year, influenza and its complications kill an estimated 250,000 people around the world. Malaria kills at least a million, mostly children.---

---"In some sense people like to be frightened," Baltimore, a leading AIDS researcher
said. "And so, to some extent what I am saying is a denial of what seems to be a basic human instinct -- to get a sort of frisson (shiver) of excitement out of danger. And the press is playing into that."

 
Referring to SARS: "I think we're the scapegoat."

– Dr. Donald Low, head of microbiology at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, April 25, 2003

 
"The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation,
disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or
the reality of most people's lives – has overrun real journalism.
Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage." — Carl Bernstein

 
The Age of Human Rights is not really dead. In the last few weeks legal authorities in Denmark and Britain have warned that if they take part in an invasion unsanctioned by the U.N., soldiers or officials from those countries could risk prosecution by the new International Criminal Court. Britain and Denmark are supporters of the ICC; it is one of the many international human rights institutions the United States has turned its back on. Inaugurated only this month, not yet hearing cases, the new court has already had an impact. The European Court of Human Rights is still in business. However much the United States may trample on the spirit of the Age of Human Rights, bodies like these will last – and there will be more of them.

 
Most of the world is empty, as we can see when we fly over it. It has been estimated
by Paul Ehrlich and others that human beings actually occupy no more than 1 to 3 percent of
the earth's land surface.

If you allotted 1250 square feet to each person, all the people in the world would fit
into the state of Texas. Try the math yourself: 7,438,152,268,800 square feet in Texas,
divided by the world population of 5,860,000,000, equals 1269 square feet per person.
The population density of this giant city would be about 21,000 — somewhat more than
San Francisco and less than the Bronx.