If you'll remember, during the Gulf War in 1991, we got newscasts of nighttime
films showing infrared casts of "smart bombs" going down chimneys in Baghdad.
I remember my father and I watching the newscasts on CNN whilst he was sitting
in pain, dying from cancer.

Mag, no matter how small or large the conflict, there will always be innocent
victims.  At least the last two battlegrounds the US has fought in (Iraq and
Afghanistan), the number of casualties has been minimised.

Anthropologically speaking, war and conflict has always been with us as
humans.  There are remains going back thousands upon thousand of years of
hominids who died from weapons (and I'm not talking about wounds consistent
with being eaten by wild animals here, unless you're talking canibalism which
is a completely different pattern on bones). The grossest example of war I
read about in my case studies was in Papua New Guinea in which warring tribes
would eat their captive's brains (and more often than not, die of kuru, a
brain disease like Mad Cow Disease).  The Caribes of the Carribean were
warlike, as were many tribes in Africa and South America.  You may deplore our
modern warfare, but really, I think we're a lot better than the traditional
cultures that were around before we became industrialised.  Then there was
nothing. We now have the Geneva Convention to ensure humane treatment of
prisoners of war, and the UN, as well as the World Court at The Hague.

I think peace is a great concept, and I gladly work for it, but I also think
it's a utopian dream, considering our history as humans.

Kat


On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 15:12:07 EDT "BG Greer, PhD" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> In a message dated 9/17/02 1:53:45 PM,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> > That's a interesting show, but I have been
> wondering if it's true
> >they have rooms where they can secretly
> monitor people's heart rates, etc.
> >
> It's probably very true. Writers of these shows
> are usually on the cutting
> edge.
> I have a photo of our entire spy plane fleet
> which looks like it was taken
> from about
> 3,000 ft. up. It was taken by a spy satellite
> 26 miles up in 1967! They can
> do infrared scans of buildings and tell how
> many people are there.
>
> Bobby
>