GLOBAL COLUMN© BY TED CORDOVA

America kidnapped: triumph of fear

And the ominous spectre of Ossama Bin Laden came over the American Elections and we knew the morning after to whom the spectre helped because the US is psychologically abducted.

If kidnapping is in the agenda of a terrorist organization such as Al Qaedda, then the group headed by Ossama Bin laden, related to the Saudi Royal family, is producing the greatest abduction ever, the population of the United States of America.

It is not a kidnapping with arms or physical, it is more psychological. Is the kidnapping by fear. Scaring almost 300 million inhabitants. It was that fear that decided the elections. The vote favored an allegedly strong leadership.

The paradox is that the agents propelling the great fear are not the terrorists themselves. They are in America, producing that fear and spraying it on the people in various forms of verbal, demagogic scare.

As president F.D. Roosevelt said in the days when Hitler’s war machine was blitzkrieging several European countries, including England, by air, the American people had the right not to live under fear. That right of not living with fear has been seriously violated by the current Republican Administration. From the initial lie of this scaremongering, which assured Americans and the World that the Iraqi dictatorship was producing weapons of mass destruction to the last big false assertion that, at any moment terrorists could blow out a nuclear artifact in any big city in the US -Dick Cheney dixit-, nothing has been rationally sustained.

Then, four days before election day came the Al Jazeera tape, showing a rather robust and healthy Ossama, the man who, according to one of many presidential bravados was going to be captured dead or alive.

The terrorist has projected his somber shadow over the US elections. Is that a defeat for Bush or for Kerry?

BIP