The case for letting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed live
What should be done with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? If the Defense Department is to be believed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks on America is guilty of mass murder and crimes against humanity. Even if the evidence elicited by waterboarding him 183 times is void, his declaration in 2002 that “I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation from A to Z” should ensure conviction.
In addition to the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,973, he is credited with commissioning shoe-bomber Richard Reid to down a transatlantic jetliner laden with 300 passengers; planning the 1993 attempt to fell the Twin Towers, the Bali nightclub bombing that killed 200 and a bomb attack in Istanbul in 2003 that killed 60; as well as plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton and to demolish the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. For those who would argue Mohammed is a war combatant rather than a dangerous psychotic, it should also be noted that he personally sawed off the head of the American reporter Daniel Pearl.
Mohammed and his co-conspirators face the death penalty, but it is by no means certain the prosecution will ask for it. There are a number of practical reasons Mohammed should instead live out his days buried in the vaults of a maximum security prison. He desperately wants to end his days of idle impotence and emerge as an inspirational figure in the Islamist war against the West. “This is what I wish, to be a martyr for a long time. I will, God willing, have this, by you,” he explained in 2008. He would be sooner forgotten alive than dead; just think of Charles Manson.
Moreover, Mohammed remains a key source for understanding al Qaeda’s modus operandi and its next moves. He has been spilling the names and whereabouts of sleeper cells, and it was his information that led to the discovery and death by Navy SEAL of Osama bin Laden. Better alive and singing than taking his secrets to the grave.
Demanding the death penalty would also entail a far longer trial, giving Mohammed more opportunities to have his remarks in court relayed to his followers. A capital sentence would open up a lengthy avenue of appeals, keeping him and his murderous creed in the headlines. Asking for life imprisonment would cut that short.
But by far the most important argument against the judicial killing of Mohammed lies in the nature of what the Princeton sage Bernard Lewis calls the “clash of civilizations” between Islamist fundamentalism and the Judeo-Christian West in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a mere speck.
The core of our beliefs is not represented by the clamor for eye-for-an-eye retribution that emerges when our peaceful way of life is shattered by terrorism. It is to be found in the key instrument of the Jewish faith, the Ten Commandments, and in the words of Jesus Christ. The Sixth Commandment could not be more clear: “Thou shalt not kill.” And Christ’s example is one of meeting violence with forgiveness and turning the other cheek.
Learning the wrong lessons from 9/11
By Michael Ignatieff The opinions expressed are his own.
One of the tasks we ask government to perform is to think the unthinkable.
Before 9/11, we may have allowed ourselves to be cynical about Western governments and their leaders, but we took it for granted that, faced with rising terrorist threats, they were not just hoping for the best but planning for the worst.
It turned out that nobody was.
The intelligence community saw warning lights flashing, but nobody took preventive action. Then airport security failed. Then the jets failed to scramble. Institutions that were supposed to protect us were asleep. In an instant, we discovered that no one was looking out for us.
The fire crews, the police and the emergency medical service teams who were called to the scene that September morning tried to make up for the failure of institutions with raw courage. The men and women in uniform who climbed upward into the fire displayed that virtue beyond measure or praise. But courage is no substitute for sovereigns that fail.
A sovereign is a state with a monopoly on the means of force. It is the object of ultimate allegiance and the source of law. It is there to protect, to defend and to secure. It is there to think the unthinkable and plan for it.
To TrulyAmerican: I’m not seeing any pending comments from you. Please repost what you’d like to post and we will have a look. Thanks.
Rebuilding America
By Stephen Flynn and Eddie Rosenstein The opinions expressed are their own.
In the ten years since 9/11, the nation’s response to the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon have been dissected and debated constantly. But one thing that hasn’t received enough attention is the effort we have taken in the intervening years to build a stronger, more resilient America for future generations.
As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in Washington at the 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Summit on September 8, 2011, “Our primary purpose today must be to look forward. [While] the perpetrators of 9/11 were obsessed with events that took place in the past, Americans always look to the future.”
Periodically, things will go very wrong. Risk and danger are inescapable facts of life. Resilience — a concept that has always defined America in times of crisis — applies not only to our response to terrorism but in our individual responses to crises large and small in our lives and in our communities.
We can be prepared, we can minimize the consequences when disaster strikes, and we can be ready to bounce back quickly whenever we are faced with catastrophes — both natural and manmade.
It is that desire to rebuild a stronger more resilient America that has shaped how we have picked ourselves up and moved forward when faced with adversity since the founding of America generations ago. That same desire also influenced our response to the 9/11 attacks.
What’s the definition of “America”? What does it mean to people? Who will benefit rebuilding it? Why do we rebuild it when the president declared “we are stronger 10 years after…”? Thanks to the internet everyone has a lot to say. But who’s listening to the “sound of silence”? For the 500K people who attended that concert at the Central park in 1982, how many of you still remembers this:
“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all gone to look for America…
The danger of symbols
By Peter Baumann and Michael W. Taft The opinions expressed are their own.
Ten years ago this Sunday, 19 madmen used commercial airliners as guided missiles to perpetrate what became the most influential act of terrorism in world history, generating mass fear, confusion, sorrow and rage on a scale that will not be forgotten. With the passing of a decade the reality of the attack—the smoke and the flames, the blood and the destruction—have receded into memory. Now the September 11th attack has become a concept, a symbol of the apex of terrorism in the new millennium.
Human beings evolved the capacity to generate symbolic thought over millions of years, a feat which allows us to predict and plan for potential threats and opportunities. For example, we put money in a 401k knowing that many years in the future we will have this money to live on. This aptitude is one ability that has made the human species uniquely successful among life on earth, as no other animal is capable of such complex future planning,
There is a downside, though, to this human capability: how we evaluate potential outcomes. If we are hunting for food and see a caribou, we get excited. Our emotional system signals us that an opportunity is present and it’s time to go after it. If, on the other hand, we see a bear, we become afraid, because our emotions are signaling it’s time to escape. This emotional evaluation system is probably similar in all animals, but the difference in humans is that we use this response pattern to judge imaginary scenarios as well.
We imagine various anticipated outcomes and choose the one that our emotions tell us is most desirable. The trouble is that some of these mental creations are completely fictitious. For example, have you ever laid awake at night worried sick about something that, later, never ended up happening? The emotions are just as real, the discomfort just as unpleasant, and yet the object of the emotions is only in our minds. Because complex planning works extremely well and has brought us tremendous success as a species, evolution moves us forward regardless of our biological weakness in responding emotionally to imaginary things. It’s an unfortunate side effect of natural selection—and yet it was a prime cause of the 9/11 attacks.
Like other human beings, the terrorists had a hard time distinguishing between real and imaginary threats when strong emotions were present. Bin Laden was greatly offended that the United States had troops stationed on Saudi soil. That some of those troops were Christian defiled the Holy Land of Islam and that some were women was an affront to Saudi manhood. The reality of American troops creating a physical barrier against the threat of an Iraqi invasion into Saudi homeland mattered far less than the imagined insult and desecration of cultural and religious icons.
Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers and the man who flew the first plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center that bright September morning, was an architect by trade. Atta had written his master’s thesis on how skyscrapers symbolize the oppression and dominance of the godless West over the virtues of Islam. Thus in his act of ultimate terrorism, he demolished a symbol in order to vanquish a threat that was entirely conceptual, killing thousands of real, flesh-and-blood humans in the process.
the writer exhibits stark misreading of reality and like many others, seems entrenched in this macho, cowboy, let’s kick their butt, mentality.
When are we going to read reality as reality, not as sound bites to makes us feel good (presumable)?
Those who attacked us did not do it just because they were evil, hate our democracy, or hate America. They are evil for the mere fact that killing thousands, indiscriminately, of innocent people. But let’s also look inward. We went to them, to their land, to their homes, we kicked their doors, killed their husbands, orphaned their kids and plundered their oil, and for whose benefits? Not for the American walking in the street, but for the likes of Halliburton, Northrp Grumman, Booz Allen, and GE. Yet again, they own all the newspapers, the broadcasting, and our Congress.
from Katharine Herrup:
Boatlifters: The unknown story of 9/11
By Katharine Herrup The opinions expressed are her own.
Much has been written and said about September 11, 2001, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, but one story much less known is the one about the band of boats that came together to rescue nearly 500,000 New Yorkers from the World Trade Center site on the day the towers collapsed.
It was the largest boatlift ever to have happened – greater than the one at Dunkirk during World War II. Yet somehow a story of such large scale became lost in all the rubble. But a new 10-minute documentary called Boatlift by Eddie Rosenstein captures the boat evacuations that happened on 9/11. The film is part of four new short documentaries that were created for the 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C.
“Boats, usually an afterthought in most New Yorkers minds, were, for the first time in over a century, the only way in or out of lower Manhattan,” says Tom Hanks, the narrator of the film.
New Yorkers don’t really think of Manhattan as an island since everything from the basics to beyond your wildest imagination is so accessible -- not typically a feature associated with island life. But on September 11, 2001, those trapped below the World Trade Center site who could not escape without swimming or being rescued by a boat were acutely reminded of that fact.
“People were actually jumping into the river and swimming out of Manhattan. Boats were very nearly running them over,” says NY Waterway Captain Rick Thornton in the film.
9/11 in history: chapter or footnote?
Historians like to break up human progress into bite-sized pieces. It’s a useful technique: segregated and labelled, historical eras offer prisms through which to view the past, making it easier to comprehend. Typically, they’re bookmarked by inventions: the wheel, the steam engine, the atom bomb. Intellectual movements fit nicely, too: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Modernism. Each innovation provides a paradigm shift, ushering in a way of thinking previously inconceivable but, after its emergence, unignorable.
Occasionally, waypoints are provided by momentous events. A happening of sufficient magnitude (the argument goes) jars the historical process decisively, severing the connection between past and future, sweeping away the old and paving the way for the new. The Flood in Genesis, the birth of Christ, the attack on Pearl Harbor – all “watershed” moments. Bookmarking such events not only provides useful academic waypoints, it also offers another important service: reassurance. With the sweeping away of the old comes trepidation. The birth of a “new era” provides a link to the past: there have been epochal events before. Things have changed rapidly, and not always for the better. We have survived them. We will again.
The impact of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46 a.m. on 11 September 2001 was immediately labelled a watershed event. Seventy-six minutes later, after both the South Tower and the Pentagon had been hit, United Airlines Flight 93’s calamitous descent into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania,marked the end of the attacks – and the start of a still-ongoing attempt to define what, exactly, they meant.
Certainly, the strikes were unprecedented. For George W. Bush, they marked a change of political eras ‘as sharp and clear as Pearl Harbor’. Secretary of State Colin Powell agreed. ‘Not only is the Cold War over,’ he explained, ‘the post-Cold War period is also over.’
Around the world the media reiterated the global significance of the event, most famously Le Monde. “Today,” stated the French newspaper, “we are all Americans.” Perhaps Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department, put it most pithily: “History starts today.” Intuitively, all of these statements made perfect sense. The magnitude – and audacity – of the 9/11 attacks were staggering. All, however, was not as it seemed.
For politicians, as for historians, predictively labeling eras is a hazardous procedure: history is littered with declarations of new eras that have somehow failed to materialize. In the aftermath of the attacks it seemed reasonable to assume that 11 September would trigger a new way of thinking.
Did it?
In World History it will be a footnote. In US History it will be a Chapter. It was a huge event in US History and its impact was social, political and economic. The Roman Empire had major events but today they are World History footnotes. In the grand scheme of history the US is growing from a footnote to perhaps a paragraph or two. But we are a long way off from being a Chapter. 6th grade ancient civilization history (Egypt, Greece, China, etc) is evidence we are in the paragraph stage. When the US has a 2000 year old history then we might look at if we are a footnote, paragraph, or a chapter.
How movies explained the lone unrecorded event of 9/11
Certain events are seared into the collective memory of those who lived at the time the event occurred. Those most affected are those who experienced the event during their critical ages of adolescence and early adulthood; those least affected are those who are born after the event occurred because of their psychological distance from the event. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy may be historical footnotes for those born after the event, but few that heard of the tragedy at the time fail to remember where they were or what they were doing when they first learned of its occurrence.
The collapse of the WTC may be even sharper on the mind than earlier historical events for those who lived through it. In part, this is due to the extensive television coverage that took place as the twin towers collapsed and to the ensuing search for survivors and cleanup efforts that followed. In part, it is also owing to the video-recording equipment widely available to the man on the street. This visual coverage of the collapse of the twin towers, the narrator of In Memoriam: New York City 9/11/2001 points out, is the reason it is “the most documented event in history.” The amount of film footage also explains the outpouring of documentaries examining the collapse.
But here, consider two fictional films that eulogize the heroic spirit of those who died on 9/11, whose actions took place far from any camera, and thus have gone unrecorded and undocumented: Flight 93 and United 93. They are not about the WTC or the war on terror; they are about the actions of unsung heroes of 9/11.
Flight 93 is an A&E made-for-television movie. The opening shows United Airline pilots going off to work in the early morning of 9/11, one kissing his sleeping wife and baby good-bye. The next ten minutes is filled with buildup: passengers, including the hijackers, going through airport security; people boarding their flights; airplanes in queue for takeoff. The next twenty minutes is spent at the American, United, and FAA Command Centers as air traffic controllers frantically track the flights, then the visual of three of the four missing planes hitting their designated targets. The viewer then joins the passengers and crew aboard the missing airline. The rest of the film shows the passengers aboard United 93 talking on cell phones to their loved ones, the hijackers taking control of the plane, the passengers being huddled to the rear of the plane, and, finally, after they learn that the WTC and Pentagon had been attacked, stoically charging the cockpit and spoiling the hijackers’ goal of hitting yet another target, most likely, the viewer is explicitly told in the concluding crawl, the White House. The film ends with sirens wailing toward the wreckage. The viewing audience knows there were no survivors.
Flight 93 comes in as a poor second cousin to the “big budget” feature, United 93, which is sharper in tone and more tightly woven. This is partly because the versatile director, Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, The Bourne Supremacy) was at the helm. United 93 also received a substantial amount of prepublicity attention, largely over whether it was too soon or appropriate to graphically depict what happened on this flight, a concern that preceded Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center as well. Flight 93, which appeared a year earlier on television, did not provoke the same attention. This appears to be largely owing to some astute marketing. When the trailers ran in Manhattan prior to the opening of the movie, the audience responded with cries of “Too soon!”
This was capitalized on by Greengrass in a flurry of interviews shortly before the file was released, giving the film a lot of free prerelease publicity. In one interview, Greengrass says, “Why are people saying it’s too soon? Like the people on that flight, we need to agree about what to do about terrorism. And I think we need to have that conversation now.” In another interview, he says, “I’ve tried so hard to stick to my principles and guidelines—that you honor and dignify the memories of innocent people who are the victims to political violence. You do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
Both films depicted the same event in pretty much the same manner, but there are two major differences in the treatment of events.
The 9/11 generation
By David Rohde The opinions expressed are his own.
In a speech last week at the American Legion convention in Minneapolis, President Obama rightly hailed what he called “the 9/11 generation,” the five million Americans who served in the military over the last decade.
“They’re a generation of innovators,” he declared. “And they’ve changed the way America fights and wins at wars.”
The following day, at a ceremony marking his retirement from the military, Gen. David Petraeus affirmed Tom Brokaw’s similar praise as the two men toured Iraq in 2003.
“He shouted to me over the noise of a helicopter before heading back to Baghdad: ‘Surely, General, this is America’s new greatest generation’,” Petraeus recalled. “I agreed with him then, and I agree with him now.”
I agree as well. There is a kernel of truth – and hope – in both statements. There is a 9/11 generation, one that extends beyond the valiant military members both men correctly hailed. Instead, it includes all Americans who experienced the attacks and responded to them over the last decade.
Its members include the tens of thousands of civilians who worked as diplomats, aid workers and contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq; the millions of police, firemen and teachers who stabilized American society in the fall of 2001 and subsequent years; and the tens of millions of innovative businesspeople and workers who brought the American economy roaring back after the attacks.
“5 million of who went to war, millions more who served in other significant ways); and a generation of children whose lives have been imprinted by events they can’t yet begin to fathom.”
As much as I sympathetic with the trauma that kid suffered – I am also aware that both he and his father and every other person serving in the military is a volunteer. I hated the draft but g had a deferment. But the draft had the benefit of making sure the war was not put on self-serving, self-perpetuating and automatic status.
A stagnant economy that seems determined to widen the gap between rich and poor is also ideal for keeping an all-volunteer army staffed. The country is becoming as fascist as the Roman Empire and can marginalize anyone not in uniform and guarantee that only those with military service ever have access to ever rarer employment prospects and all in the name of a war that never has to end. It is too easy to invent a terrorist threat.
And you exploit a generation of children that may have been too young to actually know much of what went on at the time. The memorials are making a kind of state religion with holy icons, sacred pilgrimage sites and all the trappings of a popular religion devoid of any spiritual significance. And that popular religion can be abused as easily – even more easily – but all the con men and opportunists that tend to dominate state support religious establishments.
The next generation – the 9/11 generation as the writer calls them – is not likely to enter a brave new world, but one that is very controlled by some very powerful grandees that are noble (and unaccountable) in all but title. And America has had homegrown aristocrats before.
These new aristocrats will not be nearly as accountable for the influence as the old world equivalent. They will never put their own skins or children on the line and will expect their less fortunate, less educated and less intelligent to do the fighting and dying for them. And they will be able to create all the propaganda, home grown patriotic pseudo-religious sentiment they like and broadcast it anywhere they like.
The cost of killing Osama bin Laden
The successful operation to kill bin Laden followed in the steps of earlier victories in the war on terror made possible by the enhanced interrogation program. Interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, thought at the time to be al-Qaeda’s operations planner, in the spring of 2002 led to the capture of much of al-Qaeda’s top leadership at the time.
On September 11, 2002, Pakistan captured Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the right-hand man to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and the primary conduit between al-Qaeda leaders and 9/11 commander Mohammed Atta. Six months later, American and Pakistani agents landed KSM, the “principal architect” of the 9/11 attacks and a “terrorist entrepreneur.”
Not only did the captures of these three commanders take significant parts of the al-Qaeda leadership out of action, they also yielded intelligence that prevented future terrorist attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report is a testament to the large amount of information that they provided.
Both Porter Goss, then-Director of the CIA, and Pat Roberts, then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said publicly that they provided “actionable intelligence.” General Michael Hayden, CIA Director at the end of the Bush administration, reported that most of the United States’ information on al-Qaeda during the first years of the war came from the interrogation of these al-Qaeda leaders. If civil libertarians had their way, however, this information would not have come into the hands of the United States. They argue that any effort to coerce a detainee constitutes “torture”— conflating any interrogation method that goes beyond standard police-house questioning with a war crime.
Furthermore, human rights lawyers and some in the media have spun a broader “torture narrative.” The Bush administration allegedly deprived al-Qaeda of Geneva Convention protections as part of a conscious conspiracy to torture al-Qaeda leaders. These interrogation methods “migrated” to Iraq, where they produced the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib.
This conspiracy theory is nothing but an exercise in hyperbole and partisan smear. The Bush administration went through its internal struggles over the Geneva issue only three months after the 9/11 attacks. American forces were still in Afghanistan and President Bush would not launch his political offensive on Iraq until the fall of 2002. Iraq presented a different situation entirely—a war between nation-states that was clearly covered under the Geneva Conventions.
Instead of conspiracy theories, the war on terror presents us with hard questions on coercive interrogation. Federal law prohibits torture. But limiting a captured terrorist to six hours’ sleep, isolating him, interrogating him for several hours, or requiring him to exercise does not constitute “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” within the meaning of that law. Surely the United States is not required to treat captured terrorists engaged in war against the United States as if they were suspects held at an American police station. Limiting our officials to polite questioning, and demanding that terrorists receive lawyers, Miranda warnings, and eventually a court trial, are more than likely to be ineffective in stopping future attacks.
good for you, big guy, to define torture. I’m really proud of you to take on the task and defend it until your death, but let me ask you a question…
2000 years ago, the preferred method of execution for the Roman empire was crucifixion. Spartacus’ entire slave army received death by crucifixion, and so did Jesus, in whom I believe you place your faith. Does the punishment always have to fit the crime? Does certainty and the fallibility of the executive branch permit any evil? or should there be some golden rule? as in only waterboard a terror suspect should you feel ready to be waterboarded in return? How many innocents have you caused to suffer and how in god’s name can you believe that you’re going to heaven?
The case for torture warrants
Rational discussion of this and other questions relating to torture proved difficult, because the issues are so emotional. Indeed, to many absolutists, the very idea of a “rational” discussion of torture is an oxymoron. To them, the issue is simple and clear-cut: torture should never be employed or even considered, because it never works; it is incompatible with democratic values; it is barbaric; it will always lead to more barbaric practices; it is worse than any evils it may prevent; it will provoke even more terrorism; it strips any democracy employing it of the moral standing to object to human rights violations by other nations or groups; and it unleashes the “law of unintended consequences.”
Most of these arguments are empirical in nature and may be true or false as matters of fact. But there is one fact that is indisputably true, has always been true, and, in my view, will always be true. That fact is that every democracy confronted with a genuine choice of evils between allowing many of its citizens to be killed by terrorists, or employing some forms of torture to prevent such multiple deaths, will opt for the use of torture. This, too, is an empirical claim, and I am entirely confident that it is true as a matter of fact.
Although the current administration, unlike its predecessor, has announced that it would never torture suspected terrorists, it has also resisted any judicial review of its counterterrorism measures. “Trust us,” but don’t ask us to justify that trust! Such an approach might be acceptable if men were angels, but no administration is run by angels. That is why visibility and accountability are essential to democratic governance. Neither is this an issue that divides along party lines. President Clinton implicitly acknowledged on National Public Radio that he would have used torture in an extreme case:
We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don’t need blanket advance approval for blanket torture. They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the President to make a finding in a [ticking bomb] case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Clinton was then asked whether he was saying there “would be more responsibility afterward for what was done.” He replied: “Yeah, well, the President could take personal responsibility for it. But you do it on a case-by-case basis, and there’d be some review of it.” He summarized his views in the following terms:
If they really believe the time comes when the only way they can get a reliable piece of information is to beat it out of someone or put a drug in their body to talk it out of’em, then they can present it to the Foreign Intelligence Court, or some other court, just under the same circumstances we do with wiretaps. Post facto . . . But I think if you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, we’re gonna be in real trouble.
Although I do not know what President Obama would say, I do know what his administration would do if faced with a real ticking bomb situation. No President would want to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent citizens if he could have prevented these deaths by authorizing the use of nonlethal torture against a guilty terrorist. If I am correct, then it is important to consider the following: if the use of torture is imminent, is it worse to close our eyes and tolerate it by low-level law enforcement officials without accountability, or instead bring it to the surface by requiring a warrant for it as a precondition to its infliction? The question is not whether some torture would or would not be used in the ticking bomb case—it surely would. The dilemma is whether it would be done openly, pursuant to a previously established legal procedure, or whether it would be done secretly, in violation of existing law. This is the important policy issue about which I have tried to begin a debate: how should a democracy make difficult choice-of-evil decisions in situations for which there is no good resolution?
“The tragic reality”, Dershowitz, is that you are unbalanced. Go back to Harvard Law School. Begin again – at the beginning.
Forgiving is the attribute of Almighty and justice as well.I hope the Almighty forgives America for its wars on flimsy reasons.There is nothing calling my life is more worthier than others.Killing innocents in abhorrent no matter who does it.