I am really sorry to hear about your working conditions, but with todays possibilities as a programmer, why do you even put up with that shit? You are supposed to have a boss to take those battles for you. Where I live they would have no people left if they stuck to their ways like that. Training new employees is expensive, and that is a language your accountists understand. Three months after finishing uni and getting my first job, recruiters started calling me (ooh, experience!). Maybe you are stuck in the only place in rural Kansas that employs programmers, but we leave in a global economy with remote working possibilities, so no excuses.

"Armed with an experimental concession from the Mexican government that grants Rhizomatica access to coveted cellular spectrum all over the country, Bloom is slowly but surely bringing coverage "

For the sake of US, it would probably better to have Saddam on the loose. The day he would be taken, dead or alive, many more would start fighting the forces of invation, *because then no one can say they're fighting for Saddam.*
The Bin Laden case is a whole other story completely;Afghanistan was attacked to get Bin Laden, and it would be a triumph if he were found.Anyting else would be a defeat.

(I'll admit to having taken the ideas from an interview with the british-pakastani intellectual Tariq Ali (author of The Clash of Fundamentalism, 2002), but what he had to say was good, none the less.