pweedas said...
Young people make some serious mistakes. Sometimes they end up in serious excrement or even dead because of it.
At least he is still alive and from what I saw, a very much better person than I imagined him to be 10 years ago.
Why would I imagine he was worse 10 years ago?
By his own admission in the letters which he wrote home to his parents, he is tickled pink that he can go to another country and start shooting across the border at other PEOPLE who he had never knew about before and now admits he didn't bother to find out about.
He took the side of vipers who prey on young impressionable fools who are easily sucked in by their supposedly high ideals and religious claptrap to turn them into canon fodder or suicide bombers.
Almost all the suicide bombers could tell the same story.
Had the situation not developed the way it did I think he would have ended up totally brainwashed and probably be back in Australia planting bombs.
Either that or lying on some flee infested worthless piece of stony dirt in Afghanistan with a bullet in his head becuase the person he was firing at decided to fire back.
Had he actually shot anyone he would also deserve to be shot.
He says he didn't, that's fine, but that's what he went there to do, that's what he was training for, and that's what he found exciting about it.
The fact that he didn't shoot anybody is his good fortune not his good plannign or intentions as by his own admission, his planning and intent was to the contrary.
He should be grateful for the fact that he is still alive.
And we can be grateful that he seems to have changed his beliefs.
He certainly comes across as a decent person now and I am happy to accept that.
He needs to stop dragging his past back into the public eye and looking for sympathy and compensation. For the most part he wont get it and it will only drag him down into self pity and depression.
He was WRONG. He paid for it. Move on.
I guess the reason he drags it into the public eye is that the government tried to stop him from earning money from his book (without a crime being committed).
If the government left him alone to get the income from his book, would most of us here had heard from him again?
I know for sure if I was held in the same conditions, I would be angry, and I would have been bitter. I suspect the sort of treatment he went under is not the thing you get over, overnight.
I can't believe that the politicians featured accepted the assurances of the US government blindly, and still insist that today.
Being retrospectively charged with a crime that we 'just made up'?
