Fox, I was thinking about this part of your If/Then proposition:
Fox wrote on Fri, 14 September 2007 16:50 |
how likely is it that a cabal of high-ranking American officials, demolition workers, local security forces, etc. conspired to commit mass murder of their own people for a paltry profit?
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There's another way to ask this of course and I'm sure it will be just as tiresome to you. How likely is this:
During the Clinton years, a group of people who had come up during various Republican administrations, getting into higher posts each time around, put together something they call the Project for the New American Century. In 97/98 they submit a letter to Clinton calling for the necessity of invading Iraq and disposing of the man the US supported and armed - Saddam Hussein, who had gone rogue on them; who was no longer cooperating with the US. The letter suggests that it might take a "Pearl Harbor-like attack on American soil" to get the public behind them.
Following a highly dubious election, involving massive manipulation of public perception and "facts", and enormous legal wrangling (conducted equally by Republicans and Democrats, but with the Republicans shouting loudest about the Democrats doing it), most of the PNAC folk are now in the highest positions possible. During their first summer in the White House, the US assembles a massive force in the Persian Gulf, poised and ready to strike Afghanistan. The new administration has been trying to strong-arm the Taliban with financial incentives into allowing Halliburton to build a pipeline for Unocal across their sovereign nation.
Now up to this point we are dealing in "fact" or history. These are things which actually happened. They aren't the fantasies of conspiracy theorists who Bill Maher and JJ so love. All this is public record, although like Bush's ignoring the August intelligence report titled "Bin Laden preparing to strike US" in favor of clearing brush, none of this was very well publicized.
Allegedly, and although this seems well-established I haven't seen enough data to say for sure, the week of September 11 2001, the entire northeast military air command goes into an exercise plan, a plan supervised by a Mr. Cheney of the Administration. This may or may not to be true. So I don't yet call it history or conspiracy. However, if true, the northeast isn't very well protected, communications are in a state of non-standard use, and response time is likely impaired.
The Towers are hit - they fall. As it turns out, 15 of the 19 hijackers are Saudi citizens. The next day, although there is a nation wide ban on any flying, a large jet travels the country stopping in various cities, picking up Saudi nationals, including many members of the Bin Laden family, who have been in business with key administration figures for 30 years, and whisks them out of the country. Concurrent with this, the administration meets and Rumsfeld and Cheney immediately suggesting connecting this to Iraq. The Saudi connection is ignored.
Against Rumsfeld's wishes, Bush gives the CIA a 30-day head start on going into Afghanistan - counting on the Pentagon for backup. When the time comes, Rumsfeld refuses the back-up, and most of the CIA people in Afghanistan are killed.
Finally the USA invades Iraq - we break it, we buy it, we start building dozens of permanent bases in the territory. The PNAC membership now has what it wants, and an unprecedented transfer of American taxpayer's money into private hands is underway (need it be said, willingly because of the fear the taxpayer is in?) via the military's use of private contractors at unprecedented levels to do a huge portion of the infrastructure and actual manned military work on the ground. The poor get poorer, the rich get richer. The profits are anything but paltry. AND, the pipeline across Afghanistan is built, but it would likely be seen as a wacko conspiracy theory to make anything of the fact that the man the US appoints president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had been Unocal's lobbyist to the Taliban.
Now Fox, almost all of this is fact, history, so the if/then HAS to be, IF all this happened, THEN how likely is it that:
- these folks were simply so lucky?
- that the son of a family who were in business with the family whose son was now president caused all this by himself? And if so, how did he get so lucky as to have almost all the fighter jets out of the way that day?
- that so many Americans died at such a precisely opportune moment to get the public to support this massive transfer of their money?
- that given all this that the beneficiaries of this disaster were simply poised to exploit it but no in any way involved in it?
The US of A is on a permanent war footing - it has been since WWII, but now it is with public approval, the War Against That Which Cannot Be Fought by War.
How likely is it that the same people who were willing to lie our way into the killing and maiming of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the killing and maiming of thousands of young Americans, didn't have it in them to do the same on domestic soil?
Just asking.
And finally, given the history, given all these If/Then possibilities, how likely is it that the information coming at me about how the towers fell is without manipulation?
DS
PS - I'm not suggesting anything about how the towers collapsed - that's beyond my ability to see or to know. I'm suggesting that there are well-grounded and logical reasons to suspect that things aren't necessarily what we're told.