FEEL SAFER YET?
In its first "Terrorism Index," released yesterday, the influential journal Foreign Affairs found surprising consensus among bipartisan experts.
Some 86 percent of them said the world has grown more, not less, dangerous, despite President George W. Bush's claims that the U.S. is winning the war on terror…
The survey's participants included an ex-secretary of state and former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, along with prominent members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
--"War on Terror Called a Failure: Washington's Diplomatic Efforts Rated a 1.8 out of a 10," Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star, June 15, 2006.
The book's ("The One Percent Doctrine," by Ronald Suskind) opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001 memo titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."
--"The Shadow of War, In a Surprising New Light," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.
"The Bush policy in Iraq has not made America safer, but has built a better terrorist."
--"Frameshop," Jeffrey Feldman, www.theframeshopisopen.com, June 20, 2006.
Remember back when Bush was running for re-election and we had all those national security color scares? The red and orange scares that scrambled municipal police departments all over the country in a frantic attempt to stop those ghastly terrorists from destroying us all?
Ever notice how we ALWAYS got a new color scare every time John Kerry had a bounce in the polls? The last serious color scare we got was the week following the Democratic presidential convention.
After Bush was re-elected, we never had another color scare, not even after London was bombed. Not even after Madrid was bombed. Not even after that dire Canadian plot was uncovered last week.
No more terrorist scares, once the Republicans were back in office.
Makes you wonder, doesn't it? In spite of the terrible cost to municipal police departments in officer overtime and canceled vacations, those terrorist scares were used by the federal government for one thing and one thing only: campaign politics, Republican-style.
They had absolutely nothing to do with national security.
The Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11, was rated for effectiveness at only 2.9 out of 10. Changes in the intelligence structure was assessed at "poor to fair," with one percent noting that reform "in most cases has produced new levels of bureaucracy in an already overly bureaucratic system."
--"War On Terror Called Failure," Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star, June 15, 2006.
The thing is, the Republicans keep beating this tired old drum that it's the DEMOCRATS who are the enemy--not al Qaeda--and that if we DARE let the Democrats take care of national security, those little wimpy wusses, why, they'll just wring their hands and go into therapy. The Republicans, however, are STRONG and DECISIVE and by God, they will KEEP US SAFE.
They're keeping us safe right now, fighting the GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR in Iraq. If we weren't fighting those terrorists in Iraq, we'd be fighting them in our own front yards. (I have a conservative friend who actually told his six-year old daughter that very thing.)
Dick Cheney is keeping us safe--he's keeping us so safe that not even the president knows what he's up to.
(Ron Suskind, in his powerful new book, "The One Percent Doctrine" writes that) Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the CIA was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation…
Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush "plausible deniability" from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details.
Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes, "Keeping certain knowledge from Bush--much of it shrouded, as well, by classification--meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed….Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial…It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much."
--"Personality, Ideology, and Bush's Terror Wars," Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review of Ron Suskind's "One Percent Doctrine," June 20, 2006.
So, let me get this straight. The president's point of view could not be fogged up with the truth; that would get in the way of White House lies to sell the war or whatever other snake oil they had to peddle. Better to keep him in the dark so he could go in front of the television cameras and be sincere because, after all, he honestly had not seen anything to the contrary to what he was saying.
What a beautiful plan. It worked too, didn't it?
While Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were going around whipping up public fears, the president was busy soothing the nation that he, and he alone, held the secret key to keeping us safe.
In this way, he could sanction such things as scooping up suspected terrorists, flying them on secret airplanes under cover of darkness to eastern European countries who had no problem with torture, and get "intelligence" from them that could then be used to…whip up public fears so that…the president could soothe those fears.
Wow, though, at least we're safer, right? We don't have those awful terrorists running around crashing planes into buildings any more thanks to those harsh policies. You gotta do whatcha gotta do to keep us safe, right?
One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al Qaeda's chief of operations…the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal fighter they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3--a boy, a young man, and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said," Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official. "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality"…
…That judgment was "echoed at the top of the CIA and was, of course, briefed to the president and vice-president," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction in the United States."
--"The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.
Like everything else coming out of this White House, this so-called "war on terror" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, illusion and magic, hypnotic media spells, sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Suspicion, not evidence, is the new formula for action. And no amount of evidence DIS-proving that suspicion, makes any difference in the dogged White House portrayal of paranoia as policy.
…an emerging portrait of the administration…eager to circumvent traditional processes of policy development and policy review, and determined to use experts (whether CIA, the Treasury Department or the military) not to help formulate policy but simply to sell predetermined initiatives to the American public.
--"Personality, Ideology, and Bush's Terror Wars," Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, June 20, 2006.
Mr. Suskind writes that the war on terror gave the president and vice president "vast creative prerogatives" to do what they want, when they want to, for whateve reason they decide" and to "create whatever reality was convenient." The potent wartime authority granted the White House in the wake of 9/11, he says, dovetailed with the admnistrations pre-9/11 desire to amp up executive power…
--ibid
But that approach constricted the mission of the intelligence and counterterrorism professionals whose point of view dominates this book. Many of them came to believe, Suskind reports, that "their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it…At least a dozen former intelligence officials speak frankly in public here.
--"The Shadow War," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.
So, basically, 9/11 was the best thing to happen for George W. Bush. It gave a lackluster loser of a one-term president a chance to stand in the rubble with a megaphone and be the country's cheerleader. It gave him the chance to do anything he wanted to do, however he wanted to do it, under the guise of "national security." It enabled him to go to war in Iraq, which his henchmen had been itching to do since Daddy pulled out--war-us interruptus--so to speak. And it gave the puppetmasters something to use to whip up public fears into a Red Alert and ensure that they would stay in the White House because even unpopular presidents get to stay in office during a war.
So. They got their war. They got their Homeland Security. But have they actually made us SAFER?
"When you strip away the politics, the experts, almost to a person, are very worried about the administration," says Joe Cirincione, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, the Washington think-tank which co-sponsored the survey. "They think none of our front-line institutions is doing a good job and that Iraq has made the terror situation much worse."
Across the board, (the experts surveyed) rated Washington's diplomatic efforts as abysmal, with a median score of 1.8 out of 10.
More than two-thirds said the United Nations and other multilateral institutions must be strengthened. In the survey's accompanying report, Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said policy analysts have never been in such agreement.
"The reason is that it's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force."
--"War On Terror Called Failure," Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star, June 15, 2006.
It's interesting to me that the administration now holds out Iraq as a teeming ant bed of swarming terrorists that should never be abandoned until we've killed them all…when, before we invaded Iraq, there weren't any terrorists there to speak of. Saddam didn't want to have anything to do with them. Most of the known al Qaeda operatives were Shi'ite Muslims--whom he hated--and they were religious extremists, which the secular Saddam did not trust. Furthermore, his ego could never tolerate the competition.
Instead, they had to content themselves with holing up in ramshackle little mud-hut training camps in Afghanistan. Had we poured all of the considerable treasure and might of the United States military into Afghanistan, we could have wiped most of them off the map, including Bin Laden.
But you've got to wonder…Did Bush REALLY want to get Bin Laden? After all, he makes a great boogie man in the "global war on terror." An enemy we can hate and fear…fear being the operative word. As long as he is at large, we can still fear him…and trust the Republicans to protect us from him.
Right?
Three months (after Bush was warned in person about the dangers of an al-Qaeda attack on the United States in August of 2001, which he ignored), with Bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief) brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Ladin cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."
--"The Shadow War," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.
As long as the CIA cherry-picked "intelligence" that backed up the wildest White House paranoid pronouncements, all was well. But when they bucked what the White House wanted to hear, they were marginalized, ignored, and called "disloyal" in much the same way military commanders on the ground in Iraq have been ignored if they did not tell the Pentagon what it wanted to hear.
The great thing about that policy was that then, when things went terribly, horribly wrong, the CIA then made the perfect scape-goat, as the White House proceeded to blame any and all mistakes on "bad intelligence."
A Pentagon unit headed by Douglas Feith was set up as an alternative to the CIA to provide, in Mr. Suskind's words, "intelligence on demand" to both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the office of the vice president...
…He depicts the CIA director George Tenet as frequently being made by the White House "to take the fall" for his superiors, on matters including the administration's handling of pre-war intelligence to the disputed 16 words in the president's State of the Union address…At the same time, Mr. Suskind suggests that Mr. Tenet acted as a kind of White House enabler…in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Tenet felt "a mix of insecurity and gratitude" vis-à-vis George W. Bush, and that eager to please his boss, he repeatedly pushed CIA staff members to come up with evidence that might support the president's public statements.
In the days after 9/11 Mr. Bush defended the embattled CIA chief to angry congressmen, and at that point, Suskind writes: "George Tenet would do anything his president asked. Anything. And George W. Bush knew it."
--"Personality, Ideology, and Bush's Terror Wars," Michiko Takutani, New York Times, June 20, 2006.
When Jeffrey Feldman, over at the Frameshop, says that Bush policy has not only not made America safer, but it has built a better terrorist, he points out the obvious. Back when the al Qaeda extremists were going through their little training operations in the Afghan mountains, they were learning some skills, but they were, by and large, untested and untried. Most of them just got indoctrinated with hate-America propaganda and then went back home to tend their poppy fields or work in Daddy's tobacco shop.
But now, not only has the war in Iraq spread a frenzy of hatred of Americans like a poisonous stain all around the world, but jihadists from all over central Asia are pouring across the mostly open borders of Iraq, hooking up with al Qaeda cells there, and learning state-of-the art skills in explosives, weaponry, and guerilla warfare. They use those skills in real-time operations against American military and coalition and Iraqi forces, blowing up armored humvees and vulnerable schoolbuses alike, engaging American troops in firefights and urban warfare, sharpening their warfare skills and hatreds on the ground in Iraq…and then they are vanishing back across the borders from whence they came, disappearing from sight until suddenly, a bomb goes off in a Madrid train and kills more than 200 innocent people.
You can thank the puppet Bush and all his malevolent puppetmasters for providing that superb training at the blood sacrifice of our Army and Marine Corps troops who fight and die against a relentless and invisible foe every miserable day of their many multiple deployments to hell--undermanned and underplanned--those brave young true patriots whose love of country has been used and abused for a campaign slogan and a cheap 30-second sound bite on the evening news.
You can thank Bush for setting up a relentless media tug of war with terrorists, and doing it in a flawless mathematic equation: one photo-op trip to Baghdad and a take-that-al-Qaeda! handshake with the Iraqi prime minister = two 20-year old American Army privates, ambushed, kidnapped, tortured and beheaded just in time for the evening news less than a week later.
The sum total cancels out the equation.
You can thank Bush for alienating most of our closest European and Asian allies to such an extent that now that he's belatedly asking for their help in paying for this half-trillion dollar war (he didn't ask before because he didn't want to share the spoils of war booty he thought we'd get)--they're saying, Nope--You broke it, bubba, you buy it.
You can thank Bush and his buddies Rumsfeld and Cheney for stretching out our military so far and so thin that now, we can't handle serious threats from real enemies like Iran and North Korea and they know it.
You can thank Bush for using this bloody godawful hateful war as a political campaign issue, bludgeoning opponents with it, smearing decorated war veterans as unpatriotic for disagreeing with it, and wielding it like a rusty whipsaw--cleaving this country down the middle and turning our Congress into screamers paralyzed into inaction by their own frustration and rage over it--while his craven chickenhawk shadow-men like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney run around calling combat veterans "cowards."
But can you thank Bush that we have not, as yet, suffered another 9/11?
Not on your life.
posted by Deanie Mills at 10:28 PM
18 Comments:
"After Bush was re-elected, we never had another color scare, not even after London was bombed. Not even after Madrid was bombed."
The Madrid bombing came months before Bush was reelected. Check your facts next time!
You are absolutely right. These are my thoughts exactly. I do remember that there were these fake alerts everytime John Kerry got a bounce in the polls, especially after that great speech at the Democratic convention. I wondered what happened to all that after the elections. No American should feel safe with this administration. Hurricane Katrina was a clear indication that the Bush administration is not only incompetent, but they will not be able to cope with any kind of disaster, natural or terrorism. They have just started building their climate of fear for this election season, with all this talk about terrorist alerts. Gee, wonder why the terrorist only want to strike during our election years!
In a very real way we can thank Bush and his buddies that we haven't had another 9/11. They were the ones who pulled off the first one.
I know a controlled demolition when I see one and would rather believe my own eyes than their lies.
Well, since I am 59 I have heard this before.
If we don't fight the VC in VietNam we will be fighting them in the streets of Dan Diego and LA.
It didn't happen then either.
We haven't had another 9/11 since 9/11. What makes anyone think that the terrorists are going to follow some timetable like the west would. They only need 1 bombing a generation to satisfy their purpose.
Anonymous, I stand corrected on the dates for the Madrid bombing, but it does not change my contention that there has not been another color scare, not only since Bush was re-elected, but since the Republican convention. If there has been, I'm open to being reminded. But the point is that those color scares, which cost municipal police departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime and lost-vacation time, not to mention great public anxiety and fear, were nothing more than campaign ads for the Republicans, and I find that shameful...
To Jack...buddy, the Supreme Court did indeed "select" Bush president in 2000, but he was re-elected in 2004. There is an incredible in-depth piece in Rolling Stone about evidence indicating that many Ohio votes were, basically, rigged, giving Bush the state and the electoral votes to put him over. Whether that is true, I don't know, but the evidence is deeply disturbing, and the official in charge of getting those votes for Bush now has Republican support in the run for Ohio governor, just as Katherine Harris was "rewarded" for her pivotal role in Florida election shenanigans in 2000...
I'm not ready to buy that Americans caused a controlled collapse of the twin towers. I'm far more incensed that FBI agents BEGGING for attention to be made toward Middle Easterners taking flying lessons in this country and only wanting to learn how to fly--not take off or land--and were ignored, and that intelligence clearly WARNING of a major al Qaeda threat to this country were personally brought to Bush's attention and he IGNORED it. Then, after 9/11, the berieved families had to FIGHT and STRUGGLE for an investigation that should have been automatic. Don't get me started; there's not enough room...
Willard, I agree with you. The rhetoric I hear coming out of Capitol Hill these days is dismayingly similar to what we heard during Vietnam, and I tell you one thing, Karl Rove would not be NEARLY so smug about using the war again as a weapon IF WE HAD A NATIONAL DRAFT--then the streets would explode with anti-war sentiment, if every mom and dad had to contend with sending their child off to die.
Security for liberty, that's the deal the gov't wants you to take. They want to keep taking away our liberties by caging protestors, forcing Amazon to not stock books like "America Deceived" by E.A. Blayre III, spying on us with the NSA and starting illegal wars. The only problem is the gov't wants your liberties but offers no security. 9/11 was an inside job.
Support indy media.
Last link (before Google Books caves):
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-38523-0
Find the GIST folder if you are sent to a file index.
http://www.budget.net/~ooglah/OOgLAH/
Pudding/GIST/GIST.html
Or paste the address together.
More reading which might explain the problem at hand. See the Vacci Papers:
paste address into one line:
http://www.budget.net/~ooglah/
OOgLAH/central.html
The Madrid bombing was proven to be under control of Spanish police agents and home grown neo-nazis.
Al-Qeada wasn't involved with the Madrid bombings any more than theyw ere involved with London bombings or probably even 911.
These long since discredited assumptions ruin an otherwise reasonable argument.
The FBI has NO EVIDENCE of OBL's involvement in 911, that is a fact.
Deanie, you need to look a bit more closely at the facts surrounding 911 before you say silly things like not being able to believe Americans were behind 911.
The FBI have NO EVIDENCE of Bin Laden's involvement.
Read that and think about it. There is on the other hand massive amounts of evidence of US involvement. Pre-knowledge is now a given in many quarters. The incredible co-incidence of hijacking exercises being conducted simulataneously with the real hijackings, thus enabling the impossible, via NORAD stand down.
As for the buildings, they were, without any doubt destroyed using pre-positioned explosives, Thermate in fact, (A type of Thermite). It is visible in the video footage available, the residues can be seen in photos from the remains and the timing and mode of the three buildings' collapses is impossible without, not merely demolitions charges, but speaking as an expert myself, an extraordinarily professional demolition. Personally I saw the buildings collapse for the first time, without prior knowledge of the plane strikes, and I saw then as most experts have realised since, a first rate explosives demolition.
All this is enough to show the truth, but there are also many witnesses from outside and even inside the buildings who heard and felt explosions. Some fourteen or more people experienced an explosion BEFORE the first plane hit. One person who was injured by this explosion, survives and along with his rescuer, William Rodriguez and fourteen other witnesses, they testify that the explosion in the basement preceded the plane crash by several seconds.
Enough already, look it up and please people, stop ignoring this massive and obvious fraud. Anyone who researchs these things a bit, cannot help but see the truth and any further denial is just ridiculous. Guys if it was all unfounded conspiracy theories, then it would not be gaining tarction all over the world, even world leaders have expressed their realisation that the US government has been involved.
Due to the removal of bomb sniffing dogs several weeks before 911, the witholding of every bit of evidence that would clarify the multitude of serious questions which continue to NOT GO AWAY. This is evidence of guilt under any normal circumstance.
WAKE UP! No amount of common sense or good analysis will do you any good if you are still being hampered by a crippling misunderstanding. You are looking outwards for an enemy and seeing clearly enough that the Bush men are making the enemy bigger and badder. You are yet stuck in the paradigm which believes the enemy attacked you first , for which no evidence exists. The real story is that the Bush men have created the enemy from thin air almost. They have taken an unimportant and insignificant, or at least isolated group and given them an image and resume which is pure fantasy. That is the first most important truth upon which any useful analysis must rest.
There were no arabs in the autopsies by the way.
Some witnesses.
Evidence of Thermite cutting charges.
Many alleged hijackers still alive. Now this really tends to fuck up the offical lie. What you must ask yourslef is since these guys are still alive, and if as the denialists try to say, this is due to them having used false IDs, then why did the Bin Laden tape which came out later on name all nineteen official names? Answer thew Bin Laden tape was a fake. Actually all inteeligence agencies around the world said this at the time.
The first Bin Laden tape after the 911, denied Al-Qaeda's invovlevment. That tape was genuine and universally recognised as such. You are wasting your time jerking around with blindfold on unless you wake up to the obvious huge PINK elephant in your living room.
More witnesses to explosives.
I have provided a few of the most obvious and simple issues here, make the effort to look at them. You wouldn't want to make a mistake like blaming the wrong people for murdering 3000 people surely?
Loose Change 2Ed.
I host the website for my friend who made a very professional 9/11 doc when he was a mere 17. He gives any one and every one the right to share it with any one else for free.
There is excellent coverage of how every single aspect of 9/11 was thoroughly orchestrated by a cabal in the Bush administration, along with concise video and eye witness testimony to thermite bringing down the towers.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848
or
http://xrl.us/kuvz
Find out why it is *routinely* the ONLY truth documentary on the top 10 list of Google Video and YouTube.
We are fucking changing the world w/ this shit!
Guys, I'm thrilled to see such active debate on my blog; it's one of the reasons I do it. Stephen from Thailand--how exciting to hear from the other side of the globe! You're welcome anytime, as are all my readers.
I would like to respectfully and gently request that we might be kinda careful about the "f" word and other profanities on the comment section. Don't get me wrong--I've been known to use it myself from time to time--but it's very important to me that I not run off any potential lurkers who might be persuaded to join the Dark Side--ha ha--but get turned off by the tone on the message board.
Make your points as forcefully as you like but just remember to keep the tone relatively civil.
Keep in mind that it could mean another vote for the Democrats, and that's what we all want, isn't it?
Re the whole debate about whether the Bush administration brought down the World Trade Center.
Guys, I do not want to get into that here and I'll tell you why.
Years ago I did a year's worth of underground in-depth research into a little-known group of right-wing extremists who were training for war on American soil. They considered the American "government" to be a sworn enemy,and anyone who worked in any kind of government job to represent that enemy.
I was 400-pages into a thriller about them, called ORDEAL, in which a small group of militant survivalists were going to bomb a federal building as an act of war....when Oklahoma City happened.
All I had to do was glance at the calendar and see the date--April 19--to know it was them and not Muslim extremists as the media was reporting in the beginning.
And when Timothy McVeigh was arrested, he would give only his name, rank, and serial number because he considered himself to be a prisoner of war and bombing babies to be "collateral damage."
While researching ORDEAL, I had attended the Soldier of Fortune convention and gun show, where I got all kinds of subversive literature on how to train for war against the government. Seminars and pamphlets on where and how to bury weapons and how to shoot the head and not body mass of federal agents.
Bill Clinton was a personal enemy to everybody in that room because they were sure he was going to try and take away their guns.
I attended seminars on the rallying cry for all those wingnuts--which was, at the time, the Branch Davidian tragedy. In those seminars, I sat through a litany of mythology that was presented to the avid attendees, things like, how the ATF had shot up their own people in the raid--not the innocent Davidians.
The speaker who made that point claimed he had the autopsy report on his desk.
Only, he didn't. But I DID. And the wounds he described WERE LIES.
They also swore and swore that David Koresh never had a .50-cal. gun. ALSO A LIE. I had spoken to the Texas Ranger who carried it out of the ashes himself.
And they had films that puported to show how the FBI had set the fire, and then kept the people inside the building to burn to death. But the films did not show that at all--it was the way they chose to manipulate what they wanted the films to say to gullible haters who were eager to swallow it.
But I had interviewed arson experts and I knew how the fire got started and the Davidians had done it themselves, so they could fulfill Koresh's insane prophecies that they would all die by fire.
I spent three days in that room listening to such rage and hatred directed at Bill and Hillary Clinton and the "government" demons that it made me physically ill. Literally.
Then I went to the gunshow. You talk about a room crammed full of paranoids? You have no idea. I was so sick by the time I flew home I spent three days in bed.
I tried to tell my conservative friends that talk-radio was going to have to tone down the rhetoric, that if they did not, some paranoid NUT would take their rantings as tacit permission to perform some horrendous act on American soil, and I warned them for a year that something terrible was going to happen.
And then came Oklahoma City. It did not help my state of mind any when my conservative friends admitted I was right, or when Soldier of Fortune magazine printed an editorial saying McVeigh was wrong to kill babies.
Guys, this kind of debate sounds exactly like the kinds of things I heard on the lunatic fringe of the far right ten years ago.
No, I'm not saying you are lunatics. Not at all.
What I am saying is HOW THIS DEBATE APPEARS to moderate-minded people who might be thinking about voting Democrat for the first time in years, like disgruntled Republicans, disenfranchised Democrats, Independents, and people too apathic before now to care.
The tide is turning in this country but all those people in the polls who are sick of the Republicans are not convinced yet that the Democrats are right.
By ranting and raving that the Bush administration brought down the World Trade Center, we do the foundation for this blog a disservice, in my opinion, because we will lose readers who are not ready to accept that thinking.
At the very least, we might feed the fantasies of the McVeigh's out there who believe retribution is the only answer.
I won't be a part of that. You want to debate whether our own government killed 3,000 people, (or that they--meaning the government and Bill Clinon and Janet Reno--killed the Branch Davidians, for that matter) that's fine, but I'm not going to get sucked into it.
Been there, done that.
On the other side.
Deanie
All of that can be answered by pointing out that there is no significant difference between the two parties. Dem or Rep is all the same from here. Neither would have done anything any different. So NO Rabbit is not preffering that DEms get voted in.
The only solution for the situation where neither party represents the people, is to get rid of them both. The problems in America are not going to be solved by simply shifting Reps out and Dems in.
I think the actual scale of the corruption and disempowerment of the citizens is escaping you to be honest. Did the theft of the 2000 and 2004 elections pass you by? I won't be surprised to see the same methods used again even down to the machines, yet the response be shifted even to a Democratic cadidate. I already expect the next POTUS has been selected and that she is Hillary Clinton.
Much of the Bushlings efforts are in their own way, setting the stage for the first woman pres.
She will still be representing the interests of corporations and the wars of conquest currently going on will continue.
Anyway the point about homegrown terrorism further makes mine about Muslims and OBL not being the real danger.
By the way I don't get what the experience with RW nutjobs pre Oklahoma bombings has to do with blindly accepting the 911 fantasy story? I am making no presumtions about blindly accepting it that cannot be justified. If you have looked at the actual details as mentioned, refutation becomes virtually impossible.
Like I said, unlike many other so called conspiracies, of which the government conspiracy theory of 911 is the craziest, the so called 911 truth movements view overral of 911 is cohesive and growing at an exponential rate. The reason is that it isn't exactly hard to prove. Its just hard to get people to overcome what is appearing to be a psychotic fear of the truth.
Otherwise why is it so hard to get people to just read a few articles which deal with provable facts and simple explanations?
Now don't be concerned about the tone of the rabbit, it is not viciousness but passion. There are many things even about WACO which don't add up as well as you say either. The few details you mentioned are of no consequence, especially the .50 cal weapon.
Even if they had owned machine guns without paying the requisite taxes which is the most they were actually supposed to be guilty of doesn't justify what was a preplanned assault using massive overwhelming force. I have seen actual video footage which convinces me that the agents may well have been shot by one of their own. I have seen footage which shows some very telling things about what was going on at WACO and I have seen pictures of a front door with lots of neat holes and which is slightly open, inwards. This suggests bullets going in, and not a hail of bullets coming out. We need not discuss it further.
By the way I'm not from Thailand. I'm from the land of Oz.
Rabbit, YOU may not want to see Dems elected, but *I* do.
Granted, a two-party process is frustrating and there is calcification on both sides, but remember Ralph Nader????
Thanks to Ralph Nader's egotistical and failed run for the presidency, we've had two terms of a malevolent administration so destructive that it will take GENERATIONS to undo the harm they have caused to the environment, the financial stability of our nation, our respect abroad, and on and on.
Recently, Nader attended a book signing for Al Gore. Their meeting was cordial, but I read somewhere that after Nader turned away, the next guy in line asked calmly, "How does it feel to be responsible for the deaths of 2500 men and women?"
Wow. I thought that was pretty harsh, but if you carry it to its logical end...if Gore had been elected, I guarandamtee you we would not have ever invaded Iraq, and those people would be alive today.
In fact, in James Carville and Paul Begala's book TAKE IT BACK, a convincing case is made that there would have been no 9/11 in the first place with Gore in charge.
What I'm saying is that there are far-reaching consequences for idealism. Most of the people who voted for Nader--including Michael Moore--were idealists. They really thought they were making a statement with their votes if not a difference.
But what they did was bleed off votes for Gore that cost him the election and consequently, has led us all down a path to hell.
The two-party system is flawed, and no, I don't want to see Hillary get the nomination either, for a whole plethora of reasons, but Bill Clinton said one time that the American people were much smarter than they were given credit for. In his book, he was clearly grateful to people for continuing to support him and his presidency through the most vile crusifixion of a politician I have ever seen in all my years as a political junkie.
Just today, I heard of a new poll in which 47% of the American people--UP FROM 39%--now want to see us set a date to withdraw from Iraq. This, in spite of two weeks of vicious attacks from Republicans on Democrats such as Kerry and Murtha, attacks that dominated the news and the airwaves for days on end. Even the New York Times used headlines that counted that strategy a victory for the Republicans.
And yet, it seems the American people were not listening, at least, half of them weren't.
So let's let the process unfurl, but if we don't fight WITHIN the system to put a Democrat in the White House, we are almost assuredly doomed to yet another conservative president and maybe Congress as well. John McCain may be a nice guy; I respect him and his beliefs, but make no mistake about it. He is no maverick. He's a hard-core conservative, and I have had enough of them.
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Blaming Ralph Nader for the current situation is close to the wackiest thing I've heard, even from an American.
It is to outsiders a puzzle that Americans see so much to argue about between two essentially similar groups. You sound as if you think the USA was going along just dandy until Bush came along. The current rogue, undemocratic bunch of criminal misanthropes are no more than a logical ascension from what has been building for a long time.
Bush is to all intents and purposes a picture pefect American, at least on the world stage. He is not an aberation, seen with the slightly clearer vision of objectivity, there isn't much about him we haven't recognised in America for a long time.
Blaming Nader for Gore's loss is even more ridiculous when you consider the election was STOLEN. How the hell can you blame Nader when the Repugs did the shonky at the polls?
Bill Clinton said one time that the American people were much smarter than they were given credit for.
I'm sorry Bill Clinton was wrong about a few things and this was one of them. Depending of course on who is giving them credit. In the end though Clinton was not any better, one elitisy is the same as another unless you live in a dream world. None of them are doing anything in your interests unless by chance it happens to co-incide with what the puppetmasters decree.
Maybe Clinton was at least more likeable and more convincing, I personally find Bush to be gross and untrustworthy just to look at. But Clinton like Bush is not really the decider. There are others who decide by what they provide to the POTUS by way of info if not directly. There were laws and clampdowns after WACO equally as suspicious as the Patriot act. Since people with longer term objctives presumably pulled off 911, there is no reason to believe Bush was directly involved, and the same thing could have happened on Clinton's watch. The result would have been the same, witness the in sync screeching coming from the Dems even now over the imaginary War on Terror.
Go ahead and vote for the one or the other, don't look to the side, that is what they want you to do. What good will it do you with the Diebold voting control and the disenfranchised voters anyway?
If the Dems are a better choice how come there are no dems resisting anything seriously that the NEO-Conmen are doing? Only crying for the military to jump higher, faster or for there to be more bureacracy surrounding all the spying on Americans.
What was that definition of insanity again? Oh yes, doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.
Maybe you will look at Jim Kirwan's words, I think they are relevant.
If people don't begin to roll-back the congressional crimes committed by the congress against those they were elected to serve, then we don't deserve the freedoms that we claim as our 'constitutional right.' Freedom can't be inherited by any generation and this one is particularly deaf to any requirement of the need for any resistance to the status quo. People the world over have recognized the connections between what happens in the political arena and the viability of their ordinary lives while Americans seem to think that politics is some kind of inside joke that they can afford to sneer at with derision. What's at stake here is whether the citizens of the USA will have any control over this government or whether the Multi-national Corporations will finally become that 'law unto themselves' who shall rule over all they covet, anywhere in the world today!
Rabbt, if you follow it through to its logical conclusion...yes, technically, the election was stolen. On that we agree. But if Gore had gotten the millions of votes that went to Nader; if he'd gotten the thousands of Nader votes in FLORIDA in the first place, there would have been no need for a recount or a decision by a Bush court granting the presidency to their favorite son.
Gore would have had a clear majority if he'd had Nader's votes.
But basically, I don't share your worldview, Rabbit. I think it's way too paranoid, defeatest, and hopeless. I have to believe that democracy in its purest form will work, that the people will be thoroughly fed up in time for the elections and vote for sanity.
Flawed though this system may be, there just isn't any other, and the Democrats are not in a position right now where they can afford to scramble around and try to invent a new system--if they do, they will surely lose. A vote for Ralph Nader was a vote for George W. Bush, pure and simple, because the system just cannot handle third parties at this time. Maybe someday, hopefully, but things are far too desperate in this country right now to risk it.
I'm sick of being beaten into submission by neocons, and if you honestly cannot see the DIFFERENCE between the two parties? Well, then you didn't live in the buckle of the Bush Bible Belt all through the Clinton years, like I do. Less than a hundred miles from his so-called hometown of Midland, Texas.
I have spent 20 years of my life biting my tongue; married to a Republican, from a Republican family, surrounded by Republicans, driven half-mad by it.
No longer.
Believe me, there are differences, and right now, we've got to go with the Dems if we want any hope whatsoever of turning back the disastrous damage that has been done to this country and this planet by the Bush Republicans.
By the way, if you REALLY don't see a difference? Scan around and read my comments from "Anonymous"--not the ones on this thread. Go over to the one on the Republican Congress painting targets on the troops backs and the one on Cut and Run Casey. See what my conservative reader thinks of me, that I'm a "far-left wacko."
The differences may not be apparent to you, but they DEFINITELY are apparent to me, and they are apparent to Republicans, and that includes those like my sister who are growing increasinly disgusted and "embarrassed" by George W. Bush and finally ready to listen to reason.
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