Aljazeera.Net - Bin Laden offers Americans truce

Aljazeera.Net - Bin Laden offers Americans truce

I think the truce is a good idea. Accept all that Bin Laden says. He speaks strangely, like a foreigner. I'm sure he thinks we are strange too. Let it be done.

As the Saudi Muslim scholar and analyst, Shaikh Said bin Zughair, reports: "if Bin Laden is sincere, we will be winners, if not, we will not lose anything."

Supposedly "the White House said on Thursday that the US 'does not negotiate with terrorists'." I went to whitehouse.gov and searched for "Bin Laden" and got a "404, file not found." The the whitehouse front page is lit up with smiling pictures of Bush and Press Secretary Scott McClellan. Where is the acknowledgement of the wars we are fighting?

Surely we can do better than that! We are English speakers and descendants and heirs of long lines of intelligent, compassionate, courageous and willing peoples with science, literature and art. Are we incapable of negotiating with anyone who shows willingness to negotiate? Do it to save the lives of people like me and you, like Jill Carroll.

UPDATE: White House Briefing, January 19 from Scott McClellan, today, in a press conference on the Bin Laden truce, replying to a leading question:

Question: He seemed to be offering a conditional truce under fair conditions, and seemed to be tying it to a U.S. pullout from Iraq.

MR. McCLELLAN: And as I indicated, clearly, the al Qaeda leaders and the terrorists are on the run. They're under a lot of pressure. We do not negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business. The terrorists started this war, and the President made it clear that we will end it at a time and place of our choosing. We continue to pursue all those who are seeking to do harm to the American people, and to bring them to justice.

If you read the rest of the transcript you will see that McClellan has nothing intelligent to say. He defers all intelligence, literally, to "the intelligence community," wherever they may be. If you met this guy in real life and needed something you would immediately ask to speak to his manager. He knows nothing. He tells us nothing. It's fixed, folks. Who's going to tell us the truth? Just the news, like brainelss dumb waiters faithfully bringing us rotted meat and curdled milk, always too late to change anything: the ever sad truths of the aftermath of 9/11, Nicholas Berg, the wedding the US bombed accidentally in Afghanistan a couple years ago, the 18 civilians the US killed this week in Pakistan . . .

Who do we, the people of the US, talk to in order to be heard and have our voice and will be done in the international world? Our Republic is too dependent on democratically elected officials in Washington. We need more of a true democracy at the national level, the Athenian model writ large, rather than the Roman model we have. With the Web most, if not all, of us could vote in a truly democratic way on "real time" issues that are important to us.