V I E W S

Whatever people may say. . .

Egyptian Actor Omar Sharif Opposed to War Friday, February 28, 2003 9:14 a.m. ET PARIS (AP) "The Islamic world is in danger of becoming completely radicalized. You're going to encourage a war of religion, East against West and Muslims against Christians, the Crusades. You're going to create more terrorists with this than ever you can imagine," the 69-year-actor said in an interview with The Associated Press. "The whole world is of the same opinion -- that this is ridiculous," he said.

"I will not leave the poor defenseless" saith the Lord.

Tony Benn:. . . I would like Mandela to lead a delegation of Nobel Peace Prize winners to go to Baghdad and negotiate a settlement and while they were there it would be hard for Mr Blair and Mr Bush to kill them with a bombardment.
Tony Benn: If the war /should it come to that/ does not have the support of the security council it will be a war of aggression and those who make it will be guilty of war crimes. If the UN supports it, it will be legal, but wrong because of the suffering and the consequences and I would not support it knowing the Americans had bullied the Security Council into agreeing.
Tony Benn: We need a peace conference under the UN for the whole of the middle-east, with weapons inspectors in Israel as well as Iraq and the Palestinians must have their state for without that there can be no peace.

"We are going to listen to (U.N. chief weapons inspector) Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei (head of the nuclear arms teams). We are going to listen to them and them alone. We are not going to listen to the United States of America," he /Nelson Mandela/ said.

A Statement By President Carter. . . 31 Jan 2003 Atlanta "Despite marshalling powerful armed forces in the Persian Gulf region and a virtual declaration of war in the State of the Union message, our government has not made a case for a preemptive military strike against Iraq, either at home or in Europe."

Volunteer human shields' to head for Iraq; US Marine's regrets Iraq-Regional, Politics, 1/22/2003 A first wave of mainly Western volunteers will leave London this weekend on a convoy bound for Iraq to act as "human shields" at key sites and populous areas in case of a U.S.-led war on Baghdad. "The potential for white Western body parts flying around with the Iraqi ones should make them think again about this imperialist oil war," organizer Ken Nichols, a former U.S. marine in the 1991 Gulf War, told Reuters. "The hypocrisy is mind-blowing. The biggest threat to world security at this moment is (U.S. President) George W. Bush," says Nichols. Nichols said his involvement in the human shield program was in part "penance" for his participation in the Gulf War when a U.S.-led force drove Saddam's troops out of Kuwait.

MSNBC NEWS SERVICES Jan. 22 On January 31, Bush hosts British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David which some see as a possible council of war. /There they go again./

Australia will arrest anyone who looks like Saddam Hussein - Mahathir KUALA LUMPUR (AFX-ASIA) "I expected this to happen because they see anybody who is a little bit coloured and has a moustache looks like (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein, they will arrest. That's their way," Mahathir /Prime Minister of Malaysia/ told reporters. His remarks were the latest in a series of broadsides aimed at Australia, including a suggestion that Prime Minister John Howard saw himself as "a white man sheriff in some black country."

December 16, 2002 "No one is seeking war, anybody who looks for war as a goal in itself is psychologically ill. . ." Syria's President Bashar Assad said yesterday in London.

Babel /Uday's paper/ said Iraq's compliance with the resolution reflected Baghdad's goodwill . . . Iraq should be rewarded by the U.N. Security Council through lifting the 12-year-old sanctions. . .

Sabri. . .stressed that the Security Council had a duty to lift sanctions against Iraq. . .

TIME magazine EUROPE Nov. 11, 2002/Vol. 160 No. 20 about Jack Chirac: "His pistols may not be as powerful as George W. Bush's, but his aim is true."

The London based Al-Hayat newspaper quoted the Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov as saying that his country rejects the U.S trends that allow the unilateral use of force. He added that his country calls for adopting a statement that asserts the U.N’s responsibility in dealing with any crisis in accordance to the U.N charter.

`It has been suggested that we hold war and peace in our hands (and) we decline that statement,' Blix /chief weapons inspector/ told journalists after discussing the U.S. proposal inside the /UN/Security Council. `Our job is to report.'

10/14/02 `Whenever I am tired, I look up into his face, and his power comes to me,' Khamis said Monday after laboring night and day to finish /a/ 20-Foot Saddam /statue/ along with nine other chalk-and-gilt renderings of Saddam in time for Election Day.

ANC Supports Saddam Hussein Grahamstown, Oct 10, 2002 (East Cape News/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX Prof Paul Maylam from the Rhodes University history department. . .said that Bush was pushing for war to secure his country's oil interests in the Middle East and bolster his popularity ahead of the upcoming mid-term elections in the US. "Bush is an inferior man of limited intelligence. He /Bush/ is a trigger-happy cowboy" Maylam said. "The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld axis of aggression is reluctant for arms inspections because they are afraid that there will be nothing there."

On October 7 speech in Cincinnati, OH -- Bush "tries to deceive the world by listing some of his past lies against Iraq," the daily quoted Information Minister Mohammad Said Al-Sahaf as saying in his comments on Bush's strongly-worded speech. "Bush attempts to blackmail the (UN) Security Council in a bid to release an oppressive resolution that would just increase and prolong Iraqis' sufferings," Al-Sahaf added.

CONGRESSMEN TRAVEL TO IRAQ FOR U.S. NATIONAL INTERESTS September 26, 2002 "I tend to think there are other ways to deal with the disarmament of Iraq, and we should exhaust every single possibility to do that before the United States takes the absolutely unprecedented step of a preemptive strike," McDermott /D-Rep. Washington/ said. "The day the United States starts saying, 'We don't like this leader; we're going to take him out no matter what the human cost is,' we have crossed a major line in international behavior. And I am very worried about that."


Sept 4, 2002 Massachusetts USA "In veterans' halls and union halls and senior citizen centers and religious groups, a lot of people raised the issue and the overwhelming majority of people expressed concern about any kind of invasion," McGovern /US Representative from Massachusetts/ said. "I was shopping at a grocery store and had a couple of people come up to me and say, please don't let us get dragged into a war with Iraq."
August 25, 2002 The Yemeni president. . . renewed his country's rejection to the American threats against Iraq. He said "This is a serious phenomenon that a 'certain country' seeks changing the regime in any other country. This matter belongs to the people of this country." . . . adding that the "region is boiling politically and all the Arab states will have the same destiny as Iraq." He continued "What is happening to Iraq will happen to the neighboring countries: Iran. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries."

June 25, 2002 The Iraqi National Assembly called for supporting Baghdad and exerting efforts to stop “Zionist-backed U.S threats”, to end the unjust embargo and stop interference in Iraq’s internal affairs. Hammid Rasheed al-Rawi, Deputy Speaker of Iraqi National Assembly . . . urged International, European and Arab Parliaments to stop U.S threats against Iraq. The UN Charter does not allow interference in internal affairs of states and that was also confirmed by international resolutions of the Security Council, al-Rawi asserted. Al-Rawi further described U.S. ongoing threats against Iraq as a violation of all international Charters and laws. U.S illegitimate use of force . . . constitutes aggression on a member state of the U.N and causes danger for world security and peace, al-Rawi added.

Arafat Held Hostage in Ramallah``We want to blow up embassies if Arafat becomes a martyr,'' protesters chanted. ``We want to hijack planes if Arafat becomes a martyr.''

Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath on Sunday rejected U.S. and Israeli demands that Arafat do more to stop Palestinian suicide attacks, saying the Palestinian leader is ``a hostage.''
``The Palestinian people in Ramallah are hostages of Israeli forces, and the American president speaks of Israel's right to defend itself ... This is very astonishing. We have not seen this before,'' Shaath said after talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher.

Historian Martin Krefflid: Israel will not defeat the Palestinians Palestine-Israel, Politics, 3/25/2002
The military historian Martin van Kreffland has said that the history of the Arab - Israeli conflict has proved that Israel will not be able to defeat the Palestinians, despite the tremendous military force it owns. The US "Time" magazine quoted Kreffland who works at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that the Israeli army might be one of the strongest armies in the world, fighting the Palestinians who only own guns, pistols and locally made mortar bombs, and despite of that the equilibrium will be flipped down when it comes to will.

NO WEAPONS INSPECTORS: Ramadan, the Iraqi vice president, said recently that the aim of /weapons inspectors/ return would be "to refresh their data on Iraq so that the next strike will be more harmful than the previous ones."

March 21, 2002 On Dick Cheney's Attempt to Circumvent the Legitimate Government of Turkey:
Chief of Staff Gen. Huseyin Kivrikoglu, who has not met any foreign leader since taking office four years ago, chaired a meeting with Cheney but Foreign Minister Ismail Cem was also included to provide a civilian presence, commentators said.
"If his insistence on meeting Gen. Kivrikoglu is due to the idea that the military in Turkey is more influential than the civilian authority, this is a lack of respect to the Turkish people and the Turkish Republic" wrote Oktay Eksi, chief columnist of the daily Hurriyet.

SADDAM AND PUTIN

" . . .Putin's envoy handed Saddam a letter expressing ``Russia's keenness to expand and boost cooperation in the interests of the two friendly countries.''

The letter. . . also expressed Russia's desire ``to develop constructive ties to lift the sanctions and solve the Iraqi case politically and diplomatically.''

Daniel Shorr on Assassinations

WASHINGTON, Sep 21, 2001 (The Christian Science Monitor via COMTEX) -- The presidential ban on assassinations may or may not be formally rescinded. It is, in any event, being treated by the Bush administration as - pardon the expression - a dead letter.

The prohibition on government-sponsored assassinations goes back to the Ford administration. It came in the wake of revelations that, under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, the CIA had plotted the murder of eight foreign leaders, most notably Fidel Castro, but also including Sukarno of Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and Leonidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

In February 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 12333, forbidding anyone employed by the United States government to "engage in or conspire to engage in assassination."

Successive presidents renewed the order, but some found ways of evading it while paying lip service to it.

The Reagan administration adopted an interpretation exempting death incidental to a military action. Ordering the bombing of Col. Muammar Qaddafi's compound in Libya in 1986, President Reagan said he wasn't trying to get one man, but added, "I don't think any of us would have shed any tears if that happened."

A similarly dry-eyed President George Bush ordered the bombing of the presidential palace in Baghdad in 1991, during the Gulf War, and said, "We're not in the position of targeting Saddam Hussein, but no one will weep for him when he is gone."

During the Clinton administration, another interpretation of the assassination ban made an exception for killing a foreign leader engaged in terrorism against America. President Clinton signed a secret order authorizing the use of lethal force against Osama bin Laden's "organization." That he might not survive was tacitly understood.

In 1991, during the Gulf War, I wrote in The Washington Post, "It is time to change Executive Order 12333 to spare us from presidential double-talk about designs on the lives of foreign foes."

That issue arises again. The Clinton order to go after Mr. bin Laden's organization is still in effect. The Bush administration is in the process of making its own search-and-destroy plans to fulfill the president's "dead or alive" order.

A 25-year-old executive order reflecting the reaction to mindless cold-war plotting against President Castro and other third-world leaders seems totally anachronistic after Sept.11. It is time to rescind an assassination ban that has no more reason for existing.

Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst at NPR.

BIN LADEN

Osama Bin Laden speaks out. . .

"U.S. aggression is affecting Muslim civilians, not just the military."

"We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal. . ."

"No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it.

The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.

The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. "