Pointing Osama Bin Laden as the master terrorist for the attacks against America, President Bush has just stated "We will win the war and there will be costs... I want justice... There's an old poster out West that said: 'wanted, dead or alive.'" And in addition, as the United States is drafting new laws to fight terrorism they are reviewing the possibilities to restore their country's 25-year ban on assassinations along with the recruiting of criminals by the FBI and the CIA. Senator Bob Graham says that "We have to have the authority to assassinate people before they can assassinate us," and Vice-President Dick Cheney adds that Washington might need "some very unsavoury characters" to its payroll in order to obtain valuable "human intelligence" about impending terrorist attacks.

Are we getting out of our own minds? Are we going to begin the body count as we did in Viet Nam? Are we going back to the Nazis time when for example the Gestapo in Rome was executing 10 civilians for every German soldier ambushed by Italian partisans? Our human life is sacred and we are blaming the suicide bombers and now the suicidal human missiles for changing the rules of terrorism. Does terrorism have any established rule? And what's the difference between ending human lives through assassinations or suicidal human missiles, the body count? 'Human intelligence' is being misappropriated by our politicians and militaries to wage a war against an invisible enemy, terrorism.

We are all forgetting that human intelligence must be sustained and nurtured for our own pursuing of peace, justice and freedom. Let us not confuse revenge with justice. Revenge and the related killing of additional human lives will only take us into the spiral of more killings and more body counts. What we need is not revenge but justice.

References

Bush: 'There will be costs' Pakistan delivers warning to Taliban, CNN September 17, 2001 http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/gen.america.under.attack/

Bush's team prepares to use 'any means at our disposal', Tom Philip, National Post, September 17, 2001 http://www.nationalpost.com/features/siege/story.html?f=/stories/20010917/692154.html