"Palme D'Or" for Mike Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11&

[D-Dave]

That is our point of disagreement. As of a few months ago the ISG had only investigated 10% of the known facilities and storage locations

Hm, okay, let's put it this way: During the "official" War Hussein used all his military arsenal to defend his Dictatorship but he did not use a single Weapon of Massdestruction. Now those who resist the US Forces in Iraq today use guerillia tactics including car bombing the own people, still no one uses poison gas or anything the like. If there are realy any supplies of those materials, don't you think those people would know where to find them and would use that knowledge to obtain and use them? I mean they are not afraid to decapitate hostages but don't use more "effective" means to make foreign forces withdraw?
To back this up, I served some time with the German Anti-Chemical Warfare Unit until just a few days before the attacks on Iraq started and what I learned there was that the Iraqis could not even drive a pickup truck to the next village without being tracked and that is just the information that was passed to our unit...so my guess is that US Headquaters knew just about everything that happened there.
One of the most astonishing line from a presidential speech comes to remembrance: "We know they have those Weapons and we know where they are!" Funny, our Unit never had such Information. Even more surprising, if that statement was true, why did the ISG inspect 10% of the known facilities without finding a drop of anthrax.
While this does not prove that there are no WMDs it certainly proves that the Bush Adminstration did not know that there were/are WMD and that is exactly my point, they presented presumptions as facts.

Generally speaking, every large metropolitan area has the same problem. What is different about America is our drug culture, and that our drug users are twice as likely as Europeans to be using cocaine, crack, amphetamines, or methamphetamines.

You can't be serious about that. Do you realy think that drug addiction and assorted crime is any different in the US then in any other western country? One difference that I can think of is the concentration of those people in ghettos, but thats about it.

My experience with the police was that they showed up later (sometimes hours later) to arrest the perpetrator of the crime, or take a statement and start an investigation. Most people cannot and do not trust that the police will shield them from violence in America.

Well, exactly my point but the two of us seem to come to different conclusions. While I think in a country that is based on law and order, which, if my memory serves me right, is true for both the US and Germany, the solution ought to be to enable the police to respond more quickly to deal with "homocidal maniacs" rather then providing the population with firearms to take the law into the own hands. Well this seems to be matter of different attitude and i guess this can not be resolved by arguments.

I see you are fodder for Moore's propaganda. I urge you and your fellow Europeans to read the 9/11 Commission Report to get the facts rather than rely on Moore's distortions. I can rebut each of your statements, but that would devolve into 7 different arguments.

Excuse me, but I am by no means "fodder" for anyones propaganda. In fact the only information in my argumentation that I used Michael Moore as a source for was the Date of the Security Briefing.

The court's decision to stop the recount in Florida is a fact and no matter what reason (if I remember correctly the court explanation was that it wanted to defend the "institution of the President") is something that appears to me as a very bad idea in a democracy.

The Security Briefing is also a fact and if you have seen the hearing of Mrs. Rice on CNN you know that she actualy argued that the title of the document "may have been misleading" so the president did not take it as seriously as it should have been taken. (btw. on the question what the Title was, she replied "Bin Laden determined to attck inside the US"...well that is reeeeaaaaly misleading)

All members of the Bin Laden familiy that were inside the US on September 11th were flown back to Saudi-Arabia without being questioned at all, thats a fact.

During my time in Kuwait I discussed the orders on how to interrogate prisoners with friends from the US forces. There was even a leaflet from Mr. Rumsfeld featuring such nice things as keeping prisoners awake for extended periods of time, hold them in "uncomfortable" positions for extended periods of time, exposing them to extreme noise, threatening them with guard dogs, blindfolding them or combinations of the above to gain information. Interestingly this leaflet made it as far as the german newspaper "Stern" which featured a copy of it in April or May this year. While any of the above treatments are a violation of the Geneva Convention and more astonishingly favored methodes used by such nice organisations as the KGB and the Eastern German "Staatssicherheit".
Even the supreme court of the US came to the conclusion that the treatment of the prisoners was illegal.

Speculations presented as Facts? See above.

A solid plan for peace? Look at the current situation. You even said it yourself when proposing a different approach to the process of rebuilding Iraq.


Now, please, rebut any of the above statements. Me and my fellow Euopeans do not like to rely on distortions as we learned from our history that it is a bad idea. So there is a scary tendency to question the things we are told, no matter what source they are coming from. Following that tendency and while not agreeing on some conclusions Moore draws, after seeing his movie I could not disprove any fact that was presented in it.