<HTML>Hi Claire,
No one is suggesting that those responsible for the planning, preparation and perpetrating of this crime should not be brought to justice but we cannot achieve that if we are prepared to abandon the very values and principles that this act was targetted against. To blindly decimate the communitys to which the guilty are said to belong and call it self defence would be a shortsighted act of folly that would leave us little better than those we condemn.
My earlier concern that the US would lash out as it did after the African embassy bombings in 1998 has been replaced by a rising sense of deep concern and anxiety over the direction that the US/Wests response is taking. I fear that a fullscale war is coming, not against a literal handful of fanatical lunatics, but against entire countries, the so-called rouge states.
I urge everyone to think about this very carefully. There is a world of differance between targetted police actions against indicted criminals and the mass, indiscriminate unleashing of the full weight of modern military forces. And what if Bin Laden turns out to have had only a peripheral involvment with this act? What if the evidence points to the Lebanese Hizbollah, Egyptian extremists or Libyan radicals, or a combination of all of these? Do we give Israel the greenlight while we bomb Ciaro and Tripoli? We have to look beyond the single act of bringing justice to those responsible and consider what happens afterwards. We cannot absolve ourselves of responsibility for the aftermath of our own actions in the coming days and weeks.
I am also deeply troubled by events closer to home. Already we are seeing attacks on ordinary people in our own countries for no other reason than that they share a skin colour or clothing style with the image of Bin Laden. What tensions must there be on the streets of Britains northern towns right now, after a summer of riots and the rising tide of the BNP?
Regards,
Derek</HTML>
