Korean Job Discussion Forums

[EFLtrainer]

Well, do you? Have the actions the US and it's allies have taken left you feeling safer four yearslater? We are speaking specifically of the US-led response to 9/11, the War on Terror. This includes Afghanistan, Iraq, the Patriot Act and anything else that is directly or indirectly linked, e.g., preparedness a la Katrina, etc.

I am hoping this won't become a debate thread. If each of you would like to post up to five short bullet points as to why **you** do or do not feel safer, feel free. However, please do not respond to any other person's post. Info only!!

This prompted me to consider this question:

Perhaps a little old, but I did'nt remember hearing about it. I do remember last year's flap.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/26/AR2005042601623.html

Overall, the number of what the U.S. government considers "significant" attacks grew to about 655 last year, up from the record of around 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides who were briefed on statistics covering incidents including the bloody school seizure in Russia and violence related to the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir.

Terrorist incidents in Iraq also dramatically increased, from 22 attacks to 198, or nine times the previous year's total -- a sensitive subset of the tally, given the Bush administration's assertion that the situation there had stabilized significantly after the U.S. handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government last summer.

The State Department announced last week that it was breaking with tradition in withholding the statistics on terrorist attacks from its congressionally mandated annual report. Critics said the move was designed to shield the government from questions about the success of its effort to combat terrorism by eliminating what amounted to the only year-to-year benchmark of progress.

Although the State Department said the data would still be made public by the new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which prepares the information, officials at the center said no decision to publish the statistics has been made.

The controversy comes a year after the State Department retracted its annual terrorism report and admitted that its initial version vastly understated the number of incidents. That became an election-year issue, as Democrats said the Bush administration tried to inflate its success in curbing global terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Last year was bad. This year is worse. They are deliberately trying to withhold data because it shows that as far as the war on terrorism internationally, we're losing," said Larry C. Johnson, a former senior State Department counterterrorism official, who first revealed the decision not to publish the data.

After a week of complaints from Congress, top aides from the State Department and the NCTC were dispatched to the Hill on Monday for a private briefing. There they acknowledged for the first time the increase in terrorist incidents, calling it a "dramatic uptick," according to participants and a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

The administration aides sought to explain the rise in attacks as the result of more inclusive methodology in counting incidents, which they argued made year-to-year comparisons "increasingly problematic," sources said.

In his letter urging Rice to release the data, Waxman said that "the large increases in terrorist attacks reported in 2004 may undermine administration claims of success in the war on terror, but political inconvenience has never been a legitimate basis for withholding facts from the American people."

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

1) I would like if an "other" option were added to the poll. That is how I would answer.

2) I think most Americans would not have felt as safe as they did in the 1990s if they knew what was going on in the outside world.

3) I don't think it is fair to judge the results of the actions of the US until several years down the road.

4) and IMHO the Iraq stats are not really applicable. When Saddam was in power there were many attacks by many of the same people who are doing them now, it just wasnt' called terror cause Saddam was in power and those who were doing the attacking were working for Saddam.

5) I don't think it is fair to charge the US for what goes on in Russia.

[desultude]

I especially like this part:

[EFLtrainer]

I wish I had an edit button.... JOO!!! PAY ATTENTION: DO **YOU** FEEL SAFER? WHY OR WHY NOT? QUESTIONS/CRITIQUES ABOUT THE POLL ITSELF ARE NOT REQUESTED!!!!!!!

This has been a public service announcement.

[desultude]

[EFLtrainer]

[bigverne]

[The Bobster]

[bigverne]

[rapier]

Terrorism doesn't worry me so much as this:


Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return,
Warns Leading Climate Expert
GEOFFREY LEAN / The Independent (UK) 23jan2005


Global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate watchdog.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive".


His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favour of Dr Pachauri - whom the former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born naturalised American, who had repeatedly called for urgent action.

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials described as a "very courageous" challenge.

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose."

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had already been reached.

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise, they lose their colours and turn a ghostly white. Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed.

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.

The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was speaking, parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.

He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent on Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of global warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting that climate change may be accelerating out of control.

He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural systems, the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution emitted in the 1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the increased pollution of later decades worked its way through. He concluded: "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive."

http://www.mindfully.org/Air/2005/Global-Warming-Approaching23jan05.htm

http://www.boloji.com/environment/029.htm

[The Bobster]

[bigverne]

[EFLtrainer]

We have now learend that some members of these forums are genetically, emotionally or intellectually unable to follow simple directions.

Back on topic, I am surprised at the response so far: 14 - 2 NOT SAFER. I actually did not expect such a wide divergence. Will it hold up? The week is young.

And, please, reserve all comments to the aforementioned bulleted list: there are lots of other threads where the issues are being discussed already. (You listening, gents?)

[The Bobster]

[EFLtrainer]