Just what the fuck is the “Christian flag”? They don’t mean the stars and stripes for sure. Hopefully not the Confederate flag…
So many Christians, so few lions…

Posted by: CluelessJoe | May 31 2005 18:01 utc | 4

CJ, you’re limiting yourself too much. There are lots of environmentally friendly ways of dealing with the problem. I don’t thing that you should be poisoning endangered species.

Posted by: Colman | May 31 2005 21:07 utc | 6

cj and colman…lol
i’m a pagan. wtf did i do to those a-holes! i like big cats.
we need rev. jones and a really big vat of kool-aid.

Posted by: lenin’s ghost | May 31 2005 22:25 utc | 8

Impeach the Bastards!

Posted by: DM | May 31 2005 23:26 utc | 10

& you know…;the report is absurd….& the things people say are absurd…& amnesty is absurd…..& it is an absurd allegation
well i imagines he runs thru a dictionary each morning with his paid help & absrud it was on that day
the sooner they face a firing squad the better

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 1 2005 0:18 utc | 12

Elder Bush would like son Jeb to run for president
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – George H. W. Bush, the president’s father, would like to see another Bush in the White House someday, saying on Tuesday that he would want his son Jeb to run for president when the timing is right….

Posted by: Nugget | Jun 1 2005 2:08 utc | 14

they can’t believe our leaders could be that incompetent or evil
If there was a conspiracy (other than the Bin Laden conspiracy), then this may be the only reason that the official version of events has gone effectively unchallanged in almost 4 years.
I, like most people, have absolutely nothing to go on other than what I am told. However, the official version does not stand up to logical analysis. Variations of the “conspiracy theories” make a lot more ‘sense’.
In the absence of any further incriminating evidence against Osama Bin Laden and the 19 high-jackers, the balance of probability of some sort of ‘insider’ involvement appears to be very, very high.
I not trying to start any debate at MoA on 9-11 evidence, but I think we could stand a hypothetical :-
If 9-11 had insider involvement – what are the implications if this conspiracy ‘unravelled’?
If 9-11 had insider involvement – and it looked like the conpiracy might unravel – what sort of smoke-screen could we expect?
Throw your tin-foil hats away, the only looney-tunes were re-elected to the White House last November.

Posted by: DM | Jun 1 2005 6:01 utc | 16

It is unlikely (to my mind) that the conspiracy theorists (the outraged..) will manage to unravel what happened. They are not military experts, logicians, aviation personnel or magicians. Such people are conspicuously missing from the 9/11 researchers roster. Second, they are working under a terrible handicap: many of the facts they attempt to analyse are false.
However, the 9/11 crowd *has* gotten a second wind. New converts are made everyday – many. With the passage of time, many Americans have become willing to examine their now longstanding disconfort and puzzlement. And realise that the official 9/11 conspiracy is bizarre and unproven, that multiple anomalies and contradictions exist.
I am sure (absolutely positive) the 9/11 crime will not be revealed within the next 20-30 years.
I can’t even imagine that under growing pressure some scapegoating might take place. Of whom? A lone assassin won’t do the trick…one possibility is some of the dead. (More suicidal nutters! bit worn out that..) Another is a few members of Gvmt (or military, etc.) – some version of LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) theories. No. Layering a second false scenario over the first one is a very poor idea – it would be difficult and the end result would not be credible.
I know some people are convinced that America would be destroyed if 9/11 unravelled.

Posted by: Noisette | Jun 1 2005 12:11 utc | 18

On the same day that I saw David Ray Griffin on CSPAN, they also had Bacevich giving a talk to the Council on Foreign Relations about his new book, (I think it’s called “American Militarism” or something like that). Very informative. He was pretty pessimistic about stopping the militarism of our culture unless something pretty catastrophic happens.

Posted by: aw | Jun 1 2005 12:16 utc | 20

Use of biological weapons in Iraq:

In an unrelated development, an Iraqi soldier died from poisoning and nine others were in critical condition after they ate free watermelon handed out at a checkpoint in northern Iraq, police said on Wednesday.
“A vendor offered a poisoned watermelon Monday to Iraqi soldiers manning checkpoints between Shorgat and Kiyara,” said police Colonel Fares Mahdi.
“One soldier died and nine others who were rushed to the hospital are in critical condition.”
Police were searching for the assassin in what is thought to be the first such attack against Iraqi security forces.

Aljazerra

Posted by: b | Jun 1 2005 13:05 utc | 22

One of the favorite conspiracy theory strands concerning 9/11 is that somehow the powers-that-be either let it happen on purpose or were in effect the perps.
The supposed aim was, according to these pundits, to permit the US (uk) to further its military agenda in the ME, by ensuring that the public would agree to fight a war on terra’. Operation Northwoods and the Reichstag fire are regularly mentioned in this context. A smug Rummy exclaims “…things related and things not!”
However, the invasion of Afgh. was planned and announced to the Taliban before 9/11 (the “carpet of bombs”) and it had been – implictly – accepted by the Intl. community. I remember this well, it all happened before 9/11. There was no question, it would go ahead. Some NGOs here were already gearing up for future action.
As for Iraq, once both Bin Laden and Bush Senior separately refrained (either thru sense or orders from on high in the case of Binny) from invading Iraq in Gulf War I, it was obvious that this was not the end of the story. And when sanctions really kicked in, and USuk twisted arms (and more!) in the UN, depriving children of clean water and eyeglasses, it was clear that Iraq was a target to be destroyed; a deadly dance would take place, and the timing depended on Saddam in a large part. He could comply, refuse provocation; or the opposite. I remember seeing Aziz on TV laying out these holding actions quite frankly. The US finally lost patience and acted.
The propaganda put forward to squeeze the Iraq invasion past the US public did feebly attempt to exploit 9/11 (Atta in Prague! ..) but the main thrust of it was what was planned long ago – Saddam was a vicious dictator, killed his own people, was non-compliant with the UN, had WMD (or was about to build them with Lego or something), oppressed his people, was a nutty fundamentalist, and so on. 9/11 was a subtext, a weak adjunct, and clumsily used. Certainly it was not a vital element.
9/11 was also unecessary for the Iraq invasion. In fact it muddied the issue and made people suspicious.
Now, once 9/11 occurred, that the US Gvmt. would attempt to squeeze out of it whatever was possible is natural.
That it was planned by them for that aim is quite frankly ludicrous. Holding that pov is an underestimation of US power and an over-estimation of what is required to get people, the public, on board.
Lastly, if the general perception tells us that this ploy worked once, why should anyone expect it to work again? A second major terrorist attack in the US might make people angry – Bush junior with his fake warrior protective stance and Patriot Acts could be seen as completely ineffective. Every pissed off and suspicious person – tens of millions of them – would immediately turn against the Govmt. in hysterical outrage.
Didn’t work in Spain, did it?
.. intended as something to think about. the quotes can be turned up by googling.

Posted by: Noisette | Jun 1 2005 15:10 utc | 24

That it was planned by them for that aim is quite frankly ludicrous.

Some people need to believe that there’s someone pulling the strings unfortunately.

Holding that pov is an underestimation of US power and an over-estimation of what is required to get people, the public, on board.

I’m rather afraid you’re right.

Posted by: Colman | Jun 1 2005 15:16 utc | 26

If 911 was a genuine “surprise attack”, which I seriously doubt, why are there so many unanswered questions?
The fake attack on the USS Liberty, the Lavon Affair, the attempted killing of the US ambassador to Lebanon spring immediately to mind.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jun 1 2005 15:38 utc | 28

it is indeed logically inconceivable that so many unique circumstances

Only if you assume competence. I see no reason to do so. In fact, on the evidence so far you need to construct quite complicated explanations to find anything they’ve touched that they haven’t fucked right up. Nothing they have done has been successful. If they’d been involved in 9/11 the planes would have ended up in the Bermuda Triangle. Their economic management is fucked up, their diplomatic attempts are screwed, their wars are total clusterfucks, they’ve destroyed their own power.
Where is the evidence for any sort of competence except for hoodwinking the US public? The US is under the control of the bloody marketing department.

Posted by: Colman | Jun 1 2005 16:19 utc | 30

Noisette, I usually love your commentary but this time you seem to have your fingers in your ears.
I agree with b real and many others, that all the evidence (and logic too) points directly at a carefully planned 9/11 scenario. It is remarkable that so much of the evidence was covered well ahead of time by advance detailed planning, and that those loose ends have been mostly swept up, if sometimes crudely. Shipping all the WTC scrap off to China to be melted down for example.
“They” are getting away with it primarily because civilised human beings cannot believe, refuse to believe, cannot be forced to believe, that other humans (at least white ones) could possibly be so low as to commit mass murder. Blame the Arabs. Ingenius.
“They” haven’t gotten away with it; many of us will never forgive and forget. To me it is almost like it happened yesterday. I’ll never stop digging, picking, fretting until the case is resolved, either by exposing the string-pullers or by those pullers reaching their goal of total domination.
No, it is not incompetence; it is a force we mortals can hardly imagine in our nightmares.

Posted by: rapt | Jun 1 2005 16:39 utc | 32

rapt, a few days ago you opined that b had banned the word fuck, and compared him to Ashcroft. You didn’t test your theory as far as I can see, nor wait to see if there was an explanation before accusing people of stuff.

Noisette, I usually love your commentary but this time you seem to have your fingers in your ears.

I like what you say, except when I don’t agree with it.

“They” are getting away with it primarily because civilised human beings cannot believe, refuse to believe, cannot be forced to believe, that other humans (at least white ones) could possibly be so low as to commit mass murder

So now it’s racism that’s stopping us believing.
Remind me again who is really behind all this?

Posted by: Colman | Jun 1 2005 16:57 utc | 34

Colman, do you know about Open Tech 2005? Ted Nelson is going to be there.

Posted by: Dismal Science | Jun 1 2005 17:20 utc | 36

It’s all in the tweaking and how much to tweak.

Posted by: beq | Jun 1 2005 17:32 utc | 38

How about some nice news. An English couple has been married for 80 years. He is 105 and she 100 years old. Amazing!
I think it has been published in the Daily Telegraph.

Posted by: Fran | Jun 1 2005 18:06 utc | 40

Oh, I’m sorry, did I fail to take you seriously enough? Silly vapid me. Maybe I’ll grow up enough to have a serious debate.
If you don’t like my imagery fine. If you’re going to use “logically” to mean “fits in my head”, then not fine.
Why was there a Pearl Harbour movie in 2001? Can we think of any reason that might happen? 60th anniversary? Damn convenient that they arranged that for 1941 so they could use it as propaganda sixty years later, isn’t it?

Posted by: Colman | Jun 1 2005 19:19 utc | 42

Colman – don’t take it so personally. at face, your point is well reasoned on the anniv, but why conclude that events in 1941 were scheduled around those in 2001, and not the other way around? you’re trying too hard to fit things into your hypothesis. for one thing, your caped crusader remark wasn’t in response to me at all. the strategies of this administration have been very successful for some, catastrophic or not. maybe their definition of competency is not the same as yours or mine.

Posted by: b real | Jun 1 2005 19:47 utc | 44

John Pilger :12 Dec 2002 Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was a new Pearl Harbor“. Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true.
The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world’s resources, it said, was “some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the “new Pearl Harbor”, described as “the opportunity of ages”. The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and “think-tanks” were established to avenge the American “defeat” in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a “peace dividend” following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.

Posted by: annie | Jun 1 2005 20:07 utc | 46

@Colman
I’ve yet to see any of this rampant incompetence by the Bush administration that you are on about. At the end of the day, they are still on top of the heap and making money hand over fist. I wish I could be so incompetent. Since this conversation was getting testy before I entered it, I won’t feel so bad about lost tempers when I throw in my tuppence.
The general assumption of incompetence was what got Reagan off of any charges for the Iran/Contra scandal. “He says he was asleep at the wheel… well, look at him. I’d buy that.” Appearing incompetent can be damned convenient when you’re at the top, or as Master Sun put it in The Art of War, “Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective” (Thomas Cleary’s translation. Shambhala edition, 1980. p.49). This is not a new idea.
Leaving aside the fact that the PNAC (remember those guys? They’re those “incompetents” composed of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. who all still have pretty good job security for doing everything as wrong as you suggest) wrote before 11. September 2001 about the requirement for a “…catastrophic and catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor” to expedite their plans(Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000. p.51). The fact that it has subsequently been acknowledged that the attack on Pearl Harbor, itself, was known by Washington D.C. and Naval Intelligence beforehand and permitted to occur in order to facilitate our involvement in the Pacific theatre and show off those neat, new atomic toys of ours to the jealous neighbour kids in the Kremlin doesn’t enter into this debate. As you remarked, it is “(d)amn convenient that they arranged that for 1941 so they could use it as propaganda sixty years later, isn’t it?” I won’t counter that argument because it is too much of a stretch for me to imagine that they invented and built the computer I am typing this message on before I even knew I was going to use it!
All sniping aside, why is this so hard to get your collective heads around? You honestly believe that the Pentagon and Oval Office gives a flying spotted owl about vast numbers of poor people being killed to line the pockets of themselves and their cronies at Halliburton (et cetera, et cetera)? You can hold such an idyllic, romantic notion that people could never be that monstrous and still sneer about how the “conspiracy theorists” are naive…?
Bottom line: Bloody typical. We’re sitting here nitpicking about moot points while the Far Right acts in concert to marginalise and disempower us. Did I say moot points? Yes, I did. Why? Because it does not matter if the US government caused or facilitated 11 September 2001 or if they were caught by surprise as everyone else. They cynically exploited it for their own advantage in either case, and that is criminal enough!

Posted by: Monolycus | Jun 1 2005 20:31 utc | 48

@Noisette(11:10am)
“The propaganda put forward to squeeze the Iraq invasion past the US public did feebly attempt to exploit 9/11 (Atta in Prague! ..) but the main thrust of it was what was planned long ago – Saddam was a vicious dictator, killed his own people, was non-compliant with the UN, had WMD (or was about to build them with Lego or something), oppressed his people, was a nutty fundamentalist, and so on. 9/11 was a subtext, a weak adjunct, and clumsily used. Certainly it was not a vital element.”
We’re all entitled to our opinion, but I personally believe Sir Richard Dearlove when he reports to his prime minister that the justification is being built around the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. Furthermore Bush himself asked the American people to “imagine another 9/11….
“Didn’t work in Spain, did it?”
No. They lost control when the EG coup went belly-up

Posted by: John | Jun 1 2005 21:01 utc | 50

Oh I’m damn too slow again and I wanted to talk about conspiracies and cock-ups and especially conspired cock ups. Look I reckon we need to accept in all likelihood we’ll never know and then move on because otherwise it just gets plain silly. For myself I’ll believe that the WTC attack was solely an A.Q. op when Bin Laden gets captured alive as is given an open trial. Since that’s highly unlikely I probably won’t accept it but more than that doesn’t really matter cause a/we’ll never really know and b/ the consequences are a lot more important than the causes.
Finally and this isn’t an attempt to put the cat amongst the pigeons-honestly! After I lifetime of magic bullets and triangle of death theories I have come to believe that LHO was a crazy acting on his own. This is really late now just been called out to keep wolf from door mid-post.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 2 2005 3:23 utc | 52

Noisette
Were you paying attention between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq? Remember the trips to the Security Council and all the issues surrounding inspection? The invasion was sold to us, the American people, on the basis that Saddam was a threat: the WMDs and the alleged 9/11 connection. The dictator aspect was at that point a feeble subthread that the administration pushed forward after the WMD and 9/11 arguments came under serious attack.
Colman
They didn’t steal the election much I’m afraid. That’s just letting the US off lightly for electing the crowd of shits. I understand why you want to believe that, but between 48% and 53% of voters voted for Bush. I don’t believe you could tell whether he was legitimately elected or not.
The vast majority of US voters failed to reject the things they knew had been done in their names. If 65% of people had voted against him he would not have been able to finesse it. It was close, so it could have been tweaked.
Are you suggesting that in the US it’s OK to steal an election if it’s close? That we have to have a vast majority to legitimately reject Bush? That’s not how it works here. I submit that much more than “tweaking” was going on; see The Informed Citizen’s Guide To The 2004 Election.

Posted by: liz | Jun 2 2005 5:12 utc | 54

Because it does not matter if the US government caused or facilitated 11 September 2001 or if they were caught by surprise as everyone else. They cynically exploited it for their own advantage in either case, and that is criminal enough!

I’m with you on that, M.

Posted by: Colman | Jun 2 2005 6:30 utc | 56

A comment on the EU constitution vote I agree with:
Thwarted by a surge of democracy

Posted by: b | Jun 2 2005 9:47 utc | 58

More Than 180 Cases of U.S. Aerial Espionage in May
Pyongyang, June 1 (KCNA) — The U.S. imperialists perpetrated more than 180 cases of aerial espionage against the DPRK in May, according to a military source. Strategic and tactical reconnaissance planes with various missions were involved in those cases after taking off U.S. air force bases in south Korea and overseas.
U-2 made shuttle flights in the skies over Tokjok Islet, Phochon and Sokcho for hours everyday to spy on the strategic targets of the DPRK.
RC-135 flew in the air above Taebu Islet, Yangphyong and Yangyang and EP-3 in the skies over Taebu Islet, Hoengsong and Kangrung to spy on the overall areas, coasts and seabed of the DPRK.
The number of the cases of such aerial espionage by the strategic reconnaissance planes reached more than 30 in May.
In the meantime, RC-7B, RC-12 and other type tactical reconnaissance planes were also hell-bent on spying on the military targets in the areas along the forefront.
Such cases of aerial espionage were committed at a time when the U.S. imperialist warmongers are stepping up the preparations for a nuclear war against the DPRK at a final phase, while massively introducing military hardware such as F-117 Stealth fighter bombers into south Korea.
This indicates that the dark clouds of a war are gathering above this land hour by hour.

Posted by: DM | Jun 2 2005 13:47 utc | 60

@b at 5:47
Thanks for the link.
I gather a lot of the people here who regret the “non” wish that the EU would act as a counterweight to US hegemony in the world. But this seems like a kind of category error. It is not the U.S as a nation that is dominant. Rather, U.S. elites are dominant, and creating an opposed elite (while it might counterweight in some ways) also puts the EU’s energy at the disposal of a similarly alienated elite.
If U.S. elitist inhumanity is the problem, how is cloning this elite a solution?

Posted by: citizen | Jun 2 2005 16:09 utc | 62

“Our hypothesis is that a higher extraterrestrial life form was engaged in creating new life and planting it on various planets. Earth is just one of them. Perhaps, after programming, our creators grow us the same way we grow bacteria in Petri dishes. We can’t know their motives – whether it was a scientific experiment, or a way of preparing new planets for colonization, or is it long time ongoing business of seedling life in the universe. If we think about it in our human terms, the extraterrestrial programmers were most probably working on one big code consisting of several projects, and the projects should have produced various life forms for various planets. They have been also trying various solutions. They wrote the big code, executed it, did not like some function, changed them or added new one, executed again, made more improvements, tried again and again. Of course, soon or later it was behind schedule. Few deadlines have already passed. Then the management began pressing for an immediate release. The programmers were ordered to cut all their idealistic plans for the future and concentrate now on one (Earth) project to meet the pressing deadline. Very likely in a rush, the programmers cut down drastically the big code and delivered basic program intended for Earth. However, at that time they were (perhaps) not quite certain which functions of the big code may be needed later and which not, so they kept them all there. Instead of cleaning the basic program by deleting all the lines of the big code, they converted them into comments, and in the rush they missed few /* symbols in the comments here or there; thus presenting mankind with illogical growth of mass of cells we know as cancer.”
seems like a stretch for me rapt

Posted by: annie | Jun 2 2005 16:29 utc | 64

I kind of wish you wouldn’t post stuff by Brooks. Whenever I read one of his columns I just get so mad that I want to scream.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 2 2005 17:22 utc | 66

annie: seems like a stretch for me rapt.
Yes it is a stretch for just about anybody annie, and that is why I like it. We the civilised humans have been educated for centuries, fed assumptions that we accept because they are comfortable.
Time for a shakeup.

Posted by: rapt | Jun 2 2005 18:37 utc | 68

I notice that “atrios” got back from vacation last week, so “billmon” is posting again.
####
  Subject: The Gold Urinal
Before his 2001 inauguration, George Bush was invited to a get acquainted tour of the White House.
After drinking several glasses of iced tea, he asked Bill Clinton if he  could use his personal bathroom.
When he entered Clinton’s personal bathroom, he was astonished to see that President Clinton had a solid g old urinal.
That afternoon, George told his wife, Laura, about the urinal.
“Just think,” he said, “When I am president, I could have a gold urinal too.   But I wouldn’t do something that self-indulgent!”
Later when Laura had lunch with Hillary at her tour of the White House, she  told Hillary how impressed George had been at his discovery of the fact that, in the President’s private bathroom, the President had a gold urinal.
That evening, when Bill and Hillary were getting ready for bed, Hillary smiled, and said to Bill….
“I found out who Pissed in your Saxophone.”

Posted by: jj | Jun 2 2005 20:19 utc | 70

Methinks Noisette toying with us.

Posted by: John | Jun 2 2005 20:47 utc | 72

Noisette – one reason that i feel needs more examination would be how don rumsfeld needed the events of 911 to get his radical changes pushed through against a climate of strong military resistance. repackaging the ‘war on terrorism’ from their experience in the reagan syndicate, a spectacular bogeyman attack at the heart of the up-to-then impenetrable pentagon was the perfect stimulus to demand everyone “think outside the box,” rewriting the quadrennial defense review rpt to accomodate rummy & his crony buddies’ (like college roommate & “tough guy” frank carlucci) agenda w/ little need for compromise. i have written on this topic previously. missile defense might be lucrative, but no-bid, minimal risk contracts, w/ outrageous terms and obscene profits are the mother load. what was that line attributed to deep throat – follow the money…

Posted by: b real | Jun 2 2005 21:28 utc | 74

Tom Engelhardt on an empire of bases, a little discussed phenomenon in our corporate and alternative media:

As the Overseas Basing Commission indicated in their recent report, such global basing plans are nothing if not wildly ambitious and sure to be wildly expensive…. When we take the bits and pieces of the global-base puzzle that have sprung up like weeds between the cracks in recent weeks and try to put them together into a map of the Pentagon’s globe, it looks rather like the one described by Shanker and Schmitt in 2003.
Begin with those prospective bases in Romania and Bulgaria (and while you’re at it, toss in the ones already in existence in the former Yugoslavia); make your way southeastwards past “Pipelineistan,” keeping your eye out for our Turkish bases and those possible future ones in Azerbaijan; take in the 4 or 5 bases we’d like to hang onto in the embattled Iraqi heartland of the Middle East (not to speak of the ones we already control in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and elsewhere in the region); take a quick glance at “oil-rich” North Africa for a second, imagining what might someday be nailed down there; then hop over base-less Axis of Evil power Iran and land at Bagram Air Base (don’t worry, you have “access”) or any of the other unnamed ones in Afghanistan where we now have a long-term foothold; don’t forget the nearby Pakistani air bases that Gen. Pervez Musharraf has given us access to (or Diego Garcia, that British “aircraft carrier” island in the Indian Ocean that’s all ours); add in our new Central Asian facilities; plot it all out on a map and what you have is a great infertile crescent of American military garrisons extending from the old Soviet-controlled lands of Eastern Europe to the old Soviet SSRs of Central Asia, reaching from Russia’s eastern border right up to the border of China. This is, of course, a map that more or less coincides with the Middle Eastern and Caspian oil heartlands of the planet.
Put in historical terms, in the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we’ve left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of some giant beast marking the scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and those former Central Asian SSRs after the Afghan war of 2001; and into Iraq after the invasion of 2003. War in Iraq, in turn, has spawned at least 106 bases of various sizes and shapes; while a low-level but ongoing guerilla conflict in Afghanistan has produced a plethora of fire bases, outposts, air bases, and detention centers of every sort. It’s a matter of bases and prisons where there is opposition. Just bases where there isn’t. This, it seems, is now the American way in the world.
Most Americans, knowing next to nothing about our global bases or the Pentagon’s basing policies, would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that ours is an empire of bases. In fact, our particular version of military empire is perhaps unique: all “gunboats,” no colonies. Nothing has been of more concern to the Pentagon-centered Bush administration abroad than bases, or of less concern to our media at home. Despite two years of catastrophic setbacks, the ambitions of the Bush White House and the Pentagon evidently remain remarkably unchanged and wildly ambitious — and, I suspect, the rule of inverse media interest still holds.

Plans for US global hegemony proceed according to the neocon Mein Kampf, er, Master Plan. Without discussion or debate. How are they going to staff all those foreign bases and prisons with recruitments down? Congress will have to pass Leave No Child Behind II.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Jun 3 2005 5:06 utc | 76

And one other point to noisettes list is evidenced in the astonishing lack of interest, in the the worlds overwhelmingly negative opinion of the US over the last 3 years — why would they take such a complex risk for the sake of public opinion then and show such utter neglect, if not downright contempt for it now? Its a little hard to see, with just about everything that they have done and has now gone horribly bad — even a hint at remorse or reconciliation that would show an empathy with public opinion. So, if before 911 they were concerned enough with rallying public opinion to stage the attacks themselves, and I dont think they would, you might assume that with the far worse opinion they’re living with now , that they would have by now, been compeled to do something (even greater) to again rally support. Fear, after all can be easily manufactured with stage blood.
.This is not to say they wouldnt cast a blind eye to a possible attack (seeing it would work in their favor), and ignore (Clark, Tenet,etc) warnings and simply allowed the world famous lack of security in the US to work its magic. And further, it would also be doable, by a few select insiders at the top making a couple of planning decisions that would cripple (accidentally)most actionable responses to an unfolding event, to in effect clear the path. Its not hard to see that on a bit of intellegence, a few unrelated and seemingly innocuous scheduling changes are sent down through unrelated channels that “unwittingly” disable enough defense layers to enable the event to happen, and yet remain clean of any incrimating evidence, or the overt look of a coordinated conspiricy.
Essentially, these people are buerocrats and are used to weilding the information and intelligence gleened from their underlings for their own purposes of power and advancement while minimizing reprisal as being the source of any failure or disloyality. To the point, this was all outlined and fashoned into a functioning machine with the the Iran-Contra affair, where duplicity in policy became official policy without an evident source of order originating from above (and the Bushies, through affection for the personal, must love the MO too).
My guess is that if there was an extensive plan for 911, it was in a mutual nefarious dellusional dream of power, but in reality, they’re all too afraid of their own lack of imagination and ability to trust the other to hatch a complex plan on their own. More likely a willful and feigned ignorance that carefully weighes the public opinion of neglegence against a bounty of fear that might overcome it without undue risk or a shadow of complicity — it is after all their way.

Posted by: anna missed | Jun 3 2005 9:42 utc | 78

Tramadol dog.

Tramadol hydrochloride. Tramadol no prescription. Tramadol side effects. Tramadol.

Posted by: Tramadol. | Jan 8 2010 20:33 utc | 80