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Campaigns Wary About October Surprise
Makoto916 writes "CNN.com has an article on how both campaigns are speculating on what the so called "October Surprise" is going to be. From the capture of Bin Laden, to the economy falling through the floor, just about everything is considered. "
What would surprise me is if Bush and Kerry jointly announced that they have both been living a lie, and are both gay lovers. Also, there'd have to be a male intern coming forward claiming sexual harassment.
Anything else would not be a surprise.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I'm not paranoid enough to believe that the US gov't is holding Mr. bin Laden at an undisclosed location, waiting for the right moment.
OTOH, I would have no problem in believing that the amount of forces dedicated to his capture has been stepped up in the last few weeks.
I find it impossible to believe that the we could capture Osama Bin Laden and keep it a secret for very long at all. News that big would definitely leak out.
I mean, I'm sure they've ramped up their efforts to capture the guy, but I'm not sure that it'd be politically expedient anyway. I mean, the Democrats have put forward so much (baseless) suspicion that, upon capture, many people might believe Bush was hiding Osama for later. Heck, some people thought that we were hiding Saddam in his little spider-hole.
My personal hypothesis: Osama is dead. He hasn't starred in any videos (it's always his "second in command"). Al-Qaeda just wants everyone to think he's alive, for morale purposes. We haven't found him yet because it's hard to find someone who doesn't have to eat, drink, breathe, or be guarded -- he could be buried anywhere.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
- adam
But I bet it'll be a new low in dirty politics.
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
Osama bin Laden, contrary to rumor, never made it out of Tora Bora. I had the chance to interview some of the SF soldiers who were there --there were about two dozen of them. Everything that moved got bombed. Everything that had a heat signature got bombed. Everything that set off the interferometers got bombed. Everything that didn't move or have a heat signature or set off the interferometers got bombed. The area was enclosed with a hard perimeter, meaning that some human being somewhere had real-time eyeballs on every square foot of that perimeter during the entire operation, either from the ground or from the air via loitering aircraft or Predators. Nobody got out.
...but it's still possible. You know what I mean?
When the troops went in to clear the caves, they didn't find bodies. They didn't even find pieces of bodies. They found fragments. A piece of jawbone with a molar in it, a fingertip, a scrap of skin with some hair attached. It was awe-inspiring and terrifying.
The idea that Osama bin Laden and his cadre just slipped out the back door with a vehicle and enough supplies to get them out of the mountains and into Pakistan is laughable in the extreme.
Why does the administration not mention this? Well, they have, indirectly, but why not come right out and say so? The reason there wasn't a screaming press release and banner headlines the next day is that we have no DNA from Osama bin Laden so there's no way for us to positively identify any of the human remains recovered as being from him. Even if we ruled out all the remains recovered, that still wouldn't be conclusive because lots and lots of men were essentially pulverized during the bombing, leaving nothing large enough to recover.
So because we can't conclusively prove that we got him, we have to concede the possibility that he might have clicked his heels together and said "there's no place like Islamabad." It's im-fucking-possible
So instead we go with indirect evidence. Has Osama bin Laden been seen since December 2001? No. Has he been heard? No. (There were some audiotapes. Some were obviously older than 12/01. Some were recorded by persons other than bin Laden. None were both contemporaneous and genuine.) Has he communicated in any way that we could intercept? No, and we can intercept anything from smoke signals to a whisper in a Jakarta nightclub. Has he given any orders, participated in any summits, done --in short --any of the things he did regularly prior to 12/01? No.
He has, in other words, disappeared from the face of the earth. For nearly three years. Which, if you know about bin Laden's personality, is something that he would have a very hard time accomplishing if he were still corporeal and animate.
Osama bin Laden is dead.
I write in my journal
What happenes to the election of a terrorist attack takes out George W?
...by the framers of the Constitution of the United States and by the authors of the 20th amendment which went into effect in 1933, and also by the authors of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.
That's not so much a conspiracy theory as it is high school civics class.
If the president dies -- including by assassination -- the vice president succeeds him. That's been a part of the system since day one, and it's been put to the test too many times.
The election is a separate question. If a presidential candidate dies after the nominating convention but before the election, that candidate's name remains on the ballot. If that candidate --now deceased --wins the election, the 20th amendment kicks in, which says that the vice president elect becomes president if the president elect dies before the inauguration.
This is also true if the president elect dies after winning the election but before being inaugurated.
And does anyone think that he hasn't already considered the possibility and planned for it?
Yes, it certainly has been
I write in my journal
I've considered this myself and I know many others have as well - without any outside impetus. During the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, many people speculated as to how the terrorist threat would play out. Terrorists want Bush in power. The reason for this is so simple that liberals and conservatives can agree. Every time that Bush attacks or threatens a predominantly Islamic country, extremists develop in the populations.
Bush's assault Afghanistan on generated massive "collateral damage" - that is, holes in civilians caused by US' guns. To some people, a 3/4 dead village can be a bit upsetting. It's no surprise that these people then rebel against the United States. They realize that Osama Bin Laden is leading the fight and join his rag-tag clan of militant jihadists.
Bush's invasion of Iraq has directly caused over 13,000 civilian deaths. If this is not enough to agitate a population into extremism, I do not know what is. Am I supposed to believe that "liberation" includes "the freedom of body from soul"? Iraqis have read US history, they know that when we crash a party we never leave. Seeing this trend, they fear an extended US led occupation in their own country. The result is a rebellion against the invader. This can manifest itself in many ways: roadside bombs, mortar attacks, and both domestic and overseas terrorism. Osama Bin Laden becomes their patron saint.
Osama Bin Laden wants Bush because Osama Bin Laden does not value human life. He does not care how many innocent deaths it takes to bring the ideals of radical Islam to the world. If Bush incites a World War in the Middle East, Bin Laden would exalt him. Osama's goal is to incite a religious war against western "infidels" and their tainted culture. These wars are giant recruiting posters for Bin Ladne.
If Bin Laden could vote in the US, he would vote Bush.
> Osama bin Laden is dead.
...
What's scary is that Osama bin Laden has the capability to speak to us from the dead!
Because Colin Powell told a senate panel in 2003 that Osama bin Laden was still alive, and the hunt for him continues, although Bush has outsourced the search effort to Pakistan for some reason.
The fact is on September 17, 2001, Bush told the American people "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'" [Source: ABC News, Sept 17, 2001]
In March of 2003, Bush significantly reversed this position, saying, "I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important." [referenced in the Boston Globe, 6/5/2004]
Since then, Bush worked to forget Osama bin Laden, or at least get the American people to. As was reported in the Washington Post on Aug 12, 2004, since the beginning of 2003, Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden's name on only 10 occasions, but not at any length. In contrast, he mentioned Saddam Hussein's name on more then 300 occasions.
In fact, during the first Presidential debate. Kerry talked directly about Osama bin Laden, which forced Bush to finally do so.
===================
BUSH: Never...when I was running -- when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I'd be doing that.
But the enemy attacked us, Jim
KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us."
Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us.
===================
Clearly, Bush's scheme of trying to get the public to forget about Osama bin Laden who attacked us on 9/11 unraveled during the debate.
As for an October surprise, if Bush has avoided capturing Osama bin Laden in order to score political points just before the election, then I can think of nothing more despicable. That would be politicizing the 9/11 attacks in a way that I think even Bush is incapable of.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
First, let me say I'm as liberal as they come and voting for Kerry. No sense in you trying to guess which side I sit on.
Okay, that being said, I would think that the news of a capture on Osama would actually hurt George W. Bush somewhat. I know a lot of people, undecided types, who think that Bush already failed when it came to capturing Bin Laden. If he was on ice somewhere and came out of the closet now it would be obvious to most that it was all just a conspiracy.
Furthermore, if Osama was "captured" between now and the election people like myself would just point out that Bush did good and I would tell people that Bush did his job and now we don't need him anymore.
I scares me to think that people would actually credit Bush with an Osama capture. He, himself, did nothing - it would all be the work of troops or foreign fighters. Seems to me that the blame for failure always goes to the guy on top but the credit is given to the men who were actually responsible. Look at Iraq. People blame all of the bad things on Saddam, not his henchmen who enforced his policies.
Just thinking... not trying to prove a point.
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There's no need to capture your employees.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You are wrong. I don't know if OBL is alive, but there were abundant survivors from the caves of Tora Bora who were allowed through the lines of the warlords and were flown out of Afghanistan to Pakistan by Pakistani ISI. There were more than 1000 Al Queda and Taliban troops flown out by Pakistani ISI.
Also, the SpecOps soldiers would not know what was happened on the front lines. US SpecOps personnel were withdrawn from the front lines when the warlords took over the fight at Tora Bora.
Some facts about the Spanish election: it was a close race before the attack, due in part of the opposition to the war from the Spanish people and thus opposed to the government being part of the coalition and the most important fact and probably decisive factor: the government lied and blamed it right away on ETA, the Basque separatist group, which has blood on its hands but was never involved in such a terrorist attack targetting random civilians.
So the US interpretation that this is just Spaniards caving in to terrorists is wrong and is just another example of how you don't get the rest of the world and this is in part due to the US media not doing a good enough job going past he sound bites.
You say the audio tapes aren't genuine? I guess you know better than the CIA and the rest of the world's intelligence agencies, because they say he is alive.
The audio messages he has taped since the Tora Bora bombing have been confirmed to be Bin Laden's voice. Confirmed by the CIA, the world media, other intelligence agencies, confirmed by the Bin Laden family members and captured Al Quida members.
It's provable that some of those messages were taped long after 12/01. Because they mention events that occurred as recently as the past year.
It's also been surmised that Bin Laden got into Pakistan months prior to the US bombings of Tora Bora. He was given months of warning to move, many suspect that's exactly what he did.
General Tommy Franks said recently that there was no firm intelligence that Bin Laden was ever in Tora Bora. Bomb it to hell and back, how could it kill him if he wasn't there?
Why can't he be found? The intelligence community has suggested he uses notes, passed hand to hand, and his taped recordings in order to communicate with his followers. They say he could be in Pakistani badlands or possibly Cashmere. Either location would making finding him neigh on impossible.
There's a big difference between wishful thinking and facts on the ground. Wish him dead with the rest of us, but the facts and most experts believe Osama Bin Laden is still alive.
Bush, OTOH, lied in order to lead the USA into an expensive, and utterly pointless war. As a result of Bush's lies there are now 1060+ dead Americans, and we've got a debt that we'll be paying for decades to come. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd put Bush's lies at around 8 or 9.
Generally, I'd argue that a person who lies about sex is simply a human; everyone lies about sex. A person who lies to trick his country into going to war is a more serious problem.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
I think Badnarik's campaign is going to throw some battelground states to kerry, and let him win.
. co l.nathan.0926.html
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The interesting thing is the main stream media and polling is either prohibiting his name being mentioned, and/or not including him in the polls.
I saw this for myself, as the other night CNN had Penn Jillette on live in Vegas. Although he has publicly endorsed Badnarik, he did not say his name on the air, (although he hinted at it) Big deal you say?
well apparently Fox has prohibited its guests from mentioning him:
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/09/26/ed
here is the relevant part
"My friend Dean Ahmad, former treasurer of the national Libertarian Party and a representative of Muslims for Badnarik, was invited to appear on Fox News' ``O'Reilly Factor,'' but was told by the producers not to mention Badnarik's name on the air. "
Now I am not saying conspiracy, but news networks are supposed to be impartial, and what could be more partisan than stopping guests from mentioning a presidential candidate who is on the ballot in 49 states?
I wish someone could get ahold of Penn and verify whether or not he was prohibited from mentioning Badnariks name...
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