Umm, all you've done is demonstrate that the CIA and ISI funded anti-Soviet muj. We were speaking, quite specifically, about Bin Laden.
Any fool knows that the US and Britain were fighting a proxy war, as you've ably demonstrated.
I believe I quoted the people who really would know, above.
I looked up 'moonbat'by the way; that you are happy to use a term like that for no real reason and with no real 'evidence' (I'm British, by the way) tells me all I need to know about the value of having a discussion with you about anything other than baseball, NFL drafts or Jeff Gordon.
In the course of researching my book on Bill Clinton and bin Laden, I interviewed Bill Peikney, who was CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1984 to 1986, and Milt Bearden, who was CIA station chief from 1986 to 1989. These two men oversaw the disbursement for all American funds to the anti-Soviet resistance. Both flatly denied that any CIA funds ever went to bin Laden. They felt so strongly about this point that they agreed to go on the record, an unusual move by normally reticent intelligence officers.
It's a broad, sweeping generalisation that doesn't fit in a bunch of cases, I know.
But there is more truth to it than most people who scream "librull!" would care to admit. I'm saying it's broadly interchangable wherever 'liberal' is used as an 'insult' or ad hominem attack.
Same with the support to Al Queda in their fight against the hated soviets. Another wonderfull case of the enemy of my enemy is my enemy as well.
This is a common myth - there was no CIA (or otherwise) support given to 'Al Queda'. Bin Laden certainly didn't need financial support - he did, and still does, have large numbers of arab backers.
The CIA supported muj that may have acted in tandem with UBL, but 'Al Queda' ('the database', colloqualiasm) were not in receipt of any US aid.
By the way, Al Queda were never your enemy during these years. It's widely accepted (see for instance Peter Bergen's essential book on the subject) that the thing that triggered UBL's hatred of the US was their decision to unilaterally leave bases in Saudi when they pulled out after '91.
Liberal == grown-up == intelligent == understands nuance
Please note that I'm not suggesting Conservative is the opposite, just that this tenuous, divisive categorisation tends to be levelled wherever the other words above could by interchanged.
See, for example David Horowitz: "University campuses are filled with liberals".
I never suggested controlled demolition as a plausible alternative - I merely voiced my opinion that igniting a diesel tank in an emergency shelter under the circumstances stated was implausible.
As it turns out, I was right - later, more qualified studies showed that WTC7 collapsed as a result of heavy structural damage, a strange design that put a lot of emphasis on very few columns and the fact that the diesel tank fed a pressurised line to the 7th floor - which was severed.
If you haven't read it yet, the Popular Mechanics article linked to elsewhere within this thread is very informative.
I'd posit that they very likely knew nothing about the reinforcing of the Pentagon. It was a surprise to me that it has windows designed to withstand overpressures associated with nuclear weaponry, for instance. I doubt they publicise what are essentially force protection measures.
I wouldn't be surprised if the size of the goddamn thing took them by surprise as well. Quite hard to visualise 757 vs Pentagon, even if you have visited the latter. This crash killed 125(?) on the ground and demolished a facade, but the total destruction they were perhaps going for wouldn't really be possible no matter where you hit it.
I believe the only tacit acknowledgement of involvement in 9/11 from UBL involved him saying they never expected the WTC to fall.
They could, of course, release the tapes from the other cameras they confiscated almost immediately (within half an hour)), including the Citgo gas station and the nearby hotel. Even if they didn't capture anything, they're still being withheld for some reason.
Of course, there are literally dozens if not hundreds of witnesses who saw the plane hit the building. These are all conveniently ignored or labelled as co-conspirators by those who have decided their truth is the pre-eminent one, such as that Thierry guy.
Of more interest to me is not what hit the Pentagon, but who was flying it. Despite discussion of ground effect and clipped lightpoles, it was a hell of a feat to level out where the plane did after making the turns it did.
Your post is well-reasoned, but I have to point out a couple of things for the sake of argument:
WTC7 collapsed because debris ignited the 47,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building as part of the emergency command center.
I'm having a hard time picturing this screnario. Diesel isn't the most combustible of fuels, and a no-doubt strengthened and shielded tank designed to provide emergency coverage shouldn't just burst into flame because of a fire several hundred metres distant horizontally and even more metres vertically. This assumption seems to depend on a Heath-Robinson style series of events that would be unlikely at best. The collapse of WTC7 remains one of the less sensational unexplained events of that day
What was Bush doing reading? Perhaps he was scheduled to read to a group of elementary students for weeks or months in advance. Perhaps the terrorists weren't considerate enough to inform Mr. Bush of the impending attack on the World Trade Center.
His visit to the school, not 10 minutes from the Sarasota airport, was indeed scheduled and announced. This makes not his inaction, but the inaction of his Secret Service detail very surprising. Contrary to your later assertion, very many people had thought about flying planes into buildings - Tom Clancy for one (had Flight 93 made it to DC it would have flown into the very building that Clancy hit with a commercial airliner, the Capitol building).
At the very least the USSS should have been bundling Bush out of there as soon as it was apparent an airliner had hit the building. Any other building and I'd waver to make this prediction, but the WTC was THE building that UBL was likely to hit, and the August 6th PDB made it clear that he was determined to strike inside the US.
As with that other seminal US event on November 22nd 1963 this controversy is likely to run and run, and thanks to the amazingly inept way in which the 9/11 commission did its job we're unlikely to see the end of this anytime soon.
By the way, "conspiracy theory" is a fantastically Orwellian phrase designed to trigger certain doubt and feelings of probable kookiness in those it is used on. A cynic might wonder just how many of the 9/11 theories are disinformation put about by those with soemthing to gain.
I'd agree with your interpretation, except for the very last bit:
When Landay continued, "But does it not say probable--" he was interrupted by Hayden, who said, "No.... The amendment says 'unreasonable search and seizure.'"
To me, this looks like he's flat out denying that the word "probable" is anywhere within the 4th amendment. As it is, if he knew this then he'd have let the guy finish his sentence.
Actually Bin Laden came that close to being snuffed by the NSA, since they have tapes of him talking to his mother by sat-phone, while he was in Afghanistan and she was in Saudi Arabia. This is why Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan using long-range cruise missiles. They missed him, too, by a few minutes, unfortunately.
Are you suggesting Clinton tried to kill his Mum?
The Sudanese strike hit an aspirin and babyfood factory (the only one in Sudan, iirc) due to very bad intel.
The strikes in afghanistan were called off because some of the royal family of the UAE were there hunting with him, unless I'm getting my airstrikes mixed up.
The subject came up when reporter Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder attempted to preface a question by stating that "the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures." Hayden interjected: "Actually, the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. That's what it says."
Landay politely corrected him, saying, "But the measure is 'probable cause,' I believe." But Hayden insisted: "The amendment says 'unreasonable search and seizure.'" When Landay continued, "But does it not say probable--" he was interrupted by Hayden, who said, "No.... The amendment says 'unreasonable search and seizure.'"
(Mod parent down, and code a decent comments system?)
Anyone who didn't see this one coming hasn't been paying attention.
When Risen at the NYTimes revealed the 'turrst surveillance program' (to give it its Orwellian name) every single indication was that this was the tip of the iceberg, from Abu Gonzalez' evasive testimony to Congress (specifically all the overly definitive "this program" statements) to the fact that TIA never really went away, it just moved from DARPA to Fort Meade. Add in the recent testimony of that AT&T employee about the NSA tap room in SF, well, duhh.
Still to come - every single international call is monitored, to match voice patterns. Keyword analysis is (AFAIK) still a black art but identifying the recipients through voicewaves is old hat. So when Mr Bush says "we want to know who's talking to terrorists" he means it literally, and after the fact, not before. Of course, the NSA measure computing power not in flops, or MIPs, but in acres, so it's anyone's guess what the corporations turned around and agreed to after 9/11.
FISA would never have covered this wholesale data mining, congress would never have authorised it, so we're back to that old chestnut, "we're at war".
Of course I live in the UK, where we have no expectation of privacy and the fact that GCHQ is routinely spying on every single one of us goes uninvestigated and unremarked.
Why don't the democrats propose a constitutional right to privacy? How would the GOP argue against privacy from government? Their voters heads would explode... federal government.. privacy... ARGH [boom]
Anyone who didn't see this one coming hasn't been paying attention.
When Risen at the NYTimes revealed the 'turrst surveillance program' (to give it its Orwellian name) every single indication was that this was the tip of the iceberg, from Abu Gonzalez' evasive testimony to Congress (specifically all the overly definitive "this program" statements) to the fact that TIA never really went away, it just moved from DARPA to Fort Meade. Add in the recent testimony of that AT&T employee about the NSA tap room in SF, well, duhh.
Still to come - every single international call is monitored, to match voice patterns. Keyword analysis is (AFAIK) still a black art but identifying the recipients through voicewaves is old hat. So when Mr Bush says "we want to know who's talking to terrorists" he means it literally, and after the fact, not before.
Of course, the NSA measure computing power not in flops, or MIPs, but in acres, so it's anyone's guess what the corporations turned around and agreed to after 9/11.
FISA would never have covered this wholesale data mining, congress would never have authorised it, so we're back to that old chestnut, "we're at war"
Of course I live in the UK, where we have no expectation of privacy and the fact that GCHQ is routinely spying on every single one of us goes uninvestigated and unremarked. In some ways the US is ahead of us on this.
Why don't the democrats propose a constitutional right to privacy? How would the GOP argue against privacy from government? Their voters heads would explode... federal government..
The US already has stealth satellites ; Misty is the commonly used name for the system, and it was the subject of a congressional rebuke last year over its high cost and apparently limited returns. US reliance on satellites for imagery is much less now that they have UAVs and other as-yet-secret assets, such as the SR-71 replacement or the SSTO vehicle for launching 'ad hoc' satellites.
3rd here - 5th if you count the twice in a row that I tried reconditioned ones from eBay. They lasted around 4 months each, by the way, versus about a year for brand new ones.
Funny how the man who can probably afford the £65 (100 USD) each one costs doesn't have to.
It's no different (and in many ways less invasive) from what Hitwise do.
Yahoo's Search Optimiser also works on snippets on each page, and is very useful thank you very much.
"You have zero privacy. Get over it". I love this quote...
Slashdot Mirror
Any fool knows that the US and Britain were fighting a proxy war, as you've ably demonstrated.
I believe I quoted the people who really would know, above.
I looked up 'moonbat'by the way; that you are happy to use a term like that for no real reason and with no real 'evidence' (I'm British, by the way) tells me all I need to know about the value of having a discussion with you about anything other than baseball, NFL drafts or Jeff Gordon.
But there is more truth to it than most people who scream "librull!" would care to admit. I'm saying it's broadly interchangable wherever 'liberal' is used as an 'insult' or ad hominem attack.
The CIA supported muj that may have acted in tandem with UBL, but 'Al Queda' ('the database', colloqualiasm) were not in receipt of any US aid.
By the way, Al Queda were never your enemy during these years. It's widely accepted (see for instance Peter Bergen's essential book on the subject) that the thing that triggered UBL's hatred of the US was their decision to unilaterally leave bases in Saudi when they pulled out after '91.
Please note that I'm not suggesting Conservative is the opposite, just that this tenuous, divisive categorisation tends to be levelled wherever the other words above could by interchanged.
See, for example David Horowitz: "University campuses are filled with liberals".
As it turns out, I was right - later, more qualified studies showed that WTC7 collapsed as a result of heavy structural damage, a strange design that put a lot of emphasis on very few columns and the fact that the diesel tank fed a pressurised line to the 7th floor - which was severed.
If you haven't read it yet, the Popular Mechanics article linked to elsewhere within this thread is very informative.
I wouldn't be surprised if the size of the goddamn thing took them by surprise as well. Quite hard to visualise 757 vs Pentagon, even if you have visited the latter. This crash killed 125(?) on the ground and demolished a facade, but the total destruction they were perhaps going for wouldn't really be possible no matter where you hit it.
I believe the only tacit acknowledgement of involvement in 9/11 from UBL involved him saying they never expected the WTC to fall.
Of course, there are literally dozens if not hundreds of witnesses who saw the plane hit the building. These are all conveniently ignored or labelled as co-conspirators by those who have decided their truth is the pre-eminent one, such as that Thierry guy.
Of more interest to me is not what hit the Pentagon, but who was flying it. Despite discussion of ground effect and clipped lightpoles, it was a hell of a feat to level out where the plane did after making the turns it did.
I'm having a hard time picturing this screnario. Diesel isn't the most combustible of fuels, and a no-doubt strengthened and shielded tank designed to provide emergency coverage shouldn't just burst into flame because of a fire several hundred metres distant horizontally and even more metres vertically. This assumption seems to depend on a Heath-Robinson style series of events that would be unlikely at best. The collapse of WTC7 remains one of the less sensational unexplained events of that day
His visit to the school, not 10 minutes from the Sarasota airport, was indeed scheduled and announced. This makes not his inaction, but the inaction of his Secret Service detail very surprising. Contrary to your later assertion, very many people had thought about flying planes into buildings - Tom Clancy for one (had Flight 93 made it to DC it would have flown into the very building that Clancy hit with a commercial airliner, the Capitol building).
At the very least the USSS should have been bundling Bush out of there as soon as it was apparent an airliner had hit the building. Any other building and I'd waver to make this prediction, but the WTC was THE building that UBL was likely to hit, and the August 6th PDB made it clear that he was determined to strike inside the US.
As with that other seminal US event on November 22nd 1963 this controversy is likely to run and run, and thanks to the amazingly inept way in which the 9/11 commission did its job we're unlikely to see the end of this anytime soon.
By the way, "conspiracy theory" is a fantastically Orwellian phrase designed to trigger certain doubt and feelings of probable kookiness in those it is used on. A cynic might wonder just how many of the 9/11 theories are disinformation put about by those with soemthing to gain.
Whereas the number of 'allowed' websites that discuss Falun Gong and the Dalai Lama in mandarin or cantonese must be huge!
That's funny, it doesn't let me compare searches for "falun gong" or "dalai lama" between, say google.co.uk and google.cn.
Must be a bug of some sort, after all, censorship is evil, right? Right?
Are you suggesting Clinton tried to kill his Mum?
The Sudanese strike hit an aspirin and babyfood factory (the only one in Sudan, iirc) due to very bad intel.
The strikes in afghanistan were called off because some of the royal family of the UAE were there hunting with him, unless I'm getting my airstrikes mixed up.
And your rhetoric in picometres. Is the concept of hyperbole a little bit much for you?
(Mod parent down, and code a decent comments system?)
Anyone who didn't see this one coming hasn't been paying attention.
When Risen at the NYTimes revealed the 'turrst surveillance program' (to give it its Orwellian name) every single indication was that this was the tip of the iceberg, from Abu Gonzalez' evasive testimony to Congress (specifically all the overly definitive "this program" statements) to the fact that TIA never really went away, it just moved from DARPA to Fort Meade. Add in the recent testimony of that AT&T employee about the NSA tap room in SF, well, duhh.
Still to come - every single international call is monitored, to match voice patterns. Keyword analysis is (AFAIK) still a black art but identifying the recipients through voicewaves is old hat. So when Mr Bush says "we want to know who's talking to terrorists" he means it literally, and after the fact, not before. Of course, the NSA measure computing power not in flops, or MIPs, but in acres, so it's anyone's guess what the corporations turned around and agreed to after 9/11.
FISA would never have covered this wholesale data mining, congress would never have authorised it, so we're back to that old chestnut, "we're at war".
Of course I live in the UK, where we have no expectation of privacy and the fact that GCHQ is routinely spying on every single one of us goes uninvestigated and unremarked.
Why don't the democrats propose a constitutional right to privacy? How would the GOP argue against privacy from government? Their voters heads would explode... federal government.. privacy... ARGH [boom]
Gah, I keep forgetting that slashdot's comments system is about 8 years behind anyone else's
Feel free to imagine line breaks where I left blank lines in the above. Stupid fucking slashcode.
Anyone who didn't see this one coming hasn't been paying attention. When Risen at the NYTimes revealed the 'turrst surveillance program' (to give it its Orwellian name) every single indication was that this was the tip of the iceberg, from Abu Gonzalez' evasive testimony to Congress (specifically all the overly definitive "this program" statements) to the fact that TIA never really went away, it just moved from DARPA to Fort Meade. Add in the recent testimony of that AT&T employee about the NSA tap room in SF, well, duhh. Still to come - every single international call is monitored, to match voice patterns. Keyword analysis is (AFAIK) still a black art but identifying the recipients through voicewaves is old hat. So when Mr Bush says "we want to know who's talking to terrorists" he means it literally, and after the fact, not before. Of course, the NSA measure computing power not in flops, or MIPs, but in acres, so it's anyone's guess what the corporations turned around and agreed to after 9/11. FISA would never have covered this wholesale data mining, congress would never have authorised it, so we're back to that old chestnut, "we're at war" Of course I live in the UK, where we have no expectation of privacy and the fact that GCHQ is routinely spying on every single one of us goes uninvestigated and unremarked. In some ways the US is ahead of us on this. Why don't the democrats propose a constitutional right to privacy? How would the GOP argue against privacy from government? Their voters heads would explode... federal government..
"Non-Earth-based marines" It really, really wouldn't surprise me if it's revealed at some point that the US is operating airships, rilly rilly big airships. Lots of background noise over the years has suggested this.
The US already has stealth satellites ; Misty is the commonly used name for the system, and it was the subject of a congressional rebuke last year over its high cost and apparently limited returns. US reliance on satellites for imagery is much less now that they have UAVs and other as-yet-secret assets, such as the SR-71 replacement or the SSTO vehicle for launching 'ad hoc' satellites.
China v the US... IN SPACE!!!
3rd here - 5th if you count the twice in a row that I tried reconditioned ones from eBay. They lasted around 4 months each, by the way, versus about a year for brand new ones.
Funny how the man who can probably afford the £65 (100 USD) each one costs doesn't have to.
IS it just me, or has the notion that rapidly rotating superconducters can be used to generate/repel gravity cropped up in numerous "conspiracy theories" about UFOs etc? Do these predate general science?
Bob Lazar claimed this, IIRC, as did a number of other 'crackpots' who tell of reverse-engineered alien tech.
Weird, is all...
And who owns the rights to the BBC-sourced BBC-made BBC archives? *Hmmm*
It's no different (and in many ways less invasive) from what Hitwise do. Yahoo's Search Optimiser also works on snippets on each page, and is very useful thank you very much. "You have zero privacy. Get over it". I love this quote...