On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Tyler Durden wrote:

Anyone guess where's Waldo (Osama) now? My guess he's on the end of a bungee being kicked into Iraq right now! (The other end of the bungee is in a US chopper!)

Osama is wherever Bush wants him to be. Once we're done with Iraq (assuming that we'd win that Vietnam**2 war - Ha!), Osama will magically produce yet another audio or video tape from North Korea or whatever nation Bush wants to make his next bitch. At this point, we do have the technology to alter both video and audio, and to build fake clips at will. I don't believe that the latest audio bite has been forged by us, but rather that the technology exists. Likely Osama is either dead or has had cosmetic surgery enough for him to live the rest of his days in the French riviera, and what sound bites and videos we have seen and will see are pre-recorded ones. While I'm opposed to us going to war since I believe that between Afghanistan and Iraq, we're opening ourselves up for a far worse beating than Vientam in the long term, I'm far more opposed to the outright lies being presented as reasons for doing so, and the sheer bald faced freedom and privacy grabs that this is an excuse for. Even if we pull a victory like we did in Japan and both democratise and capitalize Afghanistan and Iraq, in the long term, they'll become economic competition. If we "do" Afghanistan again, like we did them after Russia fell and abadon them without further support, it'll turn out the same as it did, like Somalia and other failed abandoned overthrown states. In the end, that will produce far more terrorists than we have seen to date, more of our freedoms will be taken away unil an equilibrium of rights will exist between the USA and dictatorships like Iraq. Luckily there's only two more years before the next election...