Jeroen wrote: > This was not an armed attack. The only items that could be seen as weapons > are the boxcutters and the likes that were used against the crews and > passengers of those planes. Hijacking a plane is not an act of war, it is > an act of terrorism.
You are correct, in a limited sense: *Hijacking* a plane is not an act of war. Piloting said plane into a civilian structure occupied by up to 20,000 civilians *IS*. > The WTC and Pentagon were hit by civilian airplanes; civilian airplanes are > not weapons. Noooooo, of course not. Technically speaking, they remained airplanes until the moment of impact. > One can then argue that they did damage, and therefore they were weapons. > The problem with that reasoning is that you can then label *anything* an > act of war. When that plane was blown up over Lockerbie, it did not only > kill everyone on board and destroy the plane, it also did a lot of damage > on the ground. Did anyone say Libya committed an act of war against > Scotland? No, it was called terrorism. The Pan Am flight was not intended to be used to kill thousands of innocent Scots - the intent was to destroy the plane and its passengers. Intent does enter into the equation, but I suspect you know this, and are merely playing your customary weasel-word games. > Heck, when I hit someone with my bare hands, my hands, are that moment, > (potentially lethal) weapons. Yet nobody will call the act of hitting that > person an act of war. Duuuuuuh. You're not a nation. One person hitting another is not an act of war, but it is an act of aggression. On an individual level, that's called *assault*. If I hit Juan that lives down the street, I've assaulted him. If the United States kills Juan, Maria and everyone in their village in Mexico, it's war. Adam C. Lipscomb [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft." - Teddy Roosevelt
