Saturday, July 31, 2004

Confused man reviews Imperial Hubris
Reviewer: Larry Hobson (Palmdale California)
"This book is nothing more than trash and any one that would buy and listen to this author has the same idiot mind as Micheal Moore does. Muslims are a different breed of people, with far different views than America was built on.

My response to Mr. Larry Hobson:
Dear Mr. Hobson,


I read your review of "Imperial Hubris". Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror cover Michael Moore does not advocate a full out assault to kill massive amounts of Muslims, the author of "Imperial Hubris"
does. How you can say that Moore and the author have the "same idiot mind" is beyond me. In all seriousness did you read the whole book? It is towards the end of the book that the author suggests the massive military assault on the Middle East, perhaps you didn't see this?
I think Moore has a flawed outlook but I won't get into the specifics. The main thing the author of "Imperial Hubris"
does get right is the motives of the 9/11 terrorists. I have been saying this for years Motives for 9/11 Terrorist Attacks (and so has several US intelligence services if you look closely, just one example: Federal Bureau of Investigation - Congressional Statements).


By the way, haven't you noticed that the 9/11 Commission has confirmed that the motives for the 9/11 attack are indeed what the author of Imperial Hubris has said?


Your comment "Muslims are a different breed of people " is plain racist. Muslims have various views. The Muslims that carry out terrorism do it because of specific policies. They share the same
motives that Mir Aimal Kasi had for killing CIA employees Frank Darling and Lansing Bennett outside CIA headquarters in Langley,Virginia in 1993 . Mir Aimal Kasi said, "What I did was a retaliation against the US government for American policy in the Middle East and its support of Israel ."

You claim that  "they" simply don't  like AMerica because they have "far different views than America was built on" is plainly false. In fact, Mir Aimal Kasi once professed a love for America, his uncle testified.  "He always say that 'I like America, I love America and I want to go there,'" Amanullah Kasi said at a sentencing hearing for his nephew, Mir Aimal Kasi . Kasi's roommate, who had reported him missing after the shootings, told police that
Kasi would get incensed watching CNN when he heard how Muslims were being treated. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Kasi said he did not approve of the attack on the World Trade Center because innocent were killed. He understood, however, the attack on the Pentagon, the symbol of government might.  ( see  Motives )

The US has teamed up with the most extreme elements in the Middle East. The US organized, funded and trained the same agendas that attacked the US in 1993 and 2001.

The very fact that the US supported the same agenda as it carried out terrorism against targets within Afghanistan and the Soviet Union should tell you how depraved US policy makers can be.

The bottom line is the immoral and unjust US foreign policies must end if we want to avoid being targeted be terrorists.

UPDATE Aug 2, 2003:

Looks like Mr. Hobson removed his review from Amazon (someone did, it isn't there. I think it was Hobson that removed it since plenty of dopey reviews of other books remain on Amazon.com ) below is what he review looked like (I retrieved it from google cache ):

7 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1 out of 5 stars Imperial Hubris, July 31, 2004

Reviewer:L. Hobson (Palmdale California)- See all my reviews
  
This book is nothing more than trash and any one that would buy and listen to this author has the same idiot mind as Micheal Moore does. Muslims are a different breed of people, with far different views than America was built on. Muslins are out to take over the world and they have the ACLU helping them get rid of all that America's believes in. President Bush is right on and any one that thinks differently I know will be voting for both Johns and put this country right into the toilet. This book isn't worth the money or the time to read.
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T REALIZE HOW EXTREME THE LYING AND MANIPULATION THEY ARE SUBJECTED TO REALLY IS!! Chomsky has documented many lies the NYT and Friedman tell in order to serve Israel:

"As the newspaper of Record, the New York Times has had to be more careful than most to safeguard the preferred version of history. To cite a few additional (and typical) examples, one priority has been to preserve the image of the United States and Israel as moderates seeking peace, faced with the terror and unremitting rejectionism of their Arab adversaries, particularly the unspeakable Palestinians. Accordingly, public PLO support in 1976 for Israel's "sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence" and its "right to live in peace within secure and recognize boundaries" is down the memory hole, even more deeply than Sadat's "famous milestone" of 1971. Similarly, when Yasser Arafat issued several calls for negotiations leading to mutual recognition in April-May 1984, the Times refused to print not only the facts but even letters referring to them. When its Jerusalem correspondent Thomas Friedman reviewed "Two Decades of Seeking Peace in the Middle East" a few months later, the major Arab(including PLO) initiatives of these two decades were excluded, and discussion was restricted to the official "peace process": various U.S. rejectionist proposals."

p241 World Orders Old and New

Friday, July 30, 2004

and it is the Israelis that not only started it, It is the Israelis that took it "to new levels of brutality, nihilism and depravity"

Israel has killed more, injured more and permanently crippled more civilians.



The media is not presenting a accurate picture of what Israel has done and continues to do.

http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/db.php?tid=27

In America you don't hear most of what Israel does.

Activists say Border Police held boy, 13, as human shield

By Reuters and Ha’aretz Service (did US mainstream media report this?) I just learned it by visiting http://www.ifamericansknew.org If Americans Knew

April 22, 2004

When older Palestinian boys started throwing stones at Border Police officers in the flashpoint West Bank village of Biddu last week, 13-year-old Muhammed Badwan went along to watch.

He ended up on the hood of a Border Police jeep, at least one of his arms tied to a wire mesh screen that blocks the windshield from incoming stones, according to a photograph of the purported incident distributed Thursday by local group Rabbis for Human Rights. These Rabbis are decent moral Jews who are exposing the depravity ofIsraeli actions. (I know you wouldn't even belive the story if it was just Palestinians who were telling it. That is how extreme the racism is of Israel supporters in America)

“He was a shield for them,” Saeed Badwan, a 34-year-old laborer, said of his only son. “When I saw him on the hood of the jeep, my whole mind went crazy... It’s a picture you can’t even imagine. He was shivering from fear.”

Police said Muhammed’s case was sent to the Justice Ministry for investigation. Security forces insist they do their utmost to avoid civilian casualties and accuse Palestinian militants of routinely using non-combatants for cover.

The Supreme Court barred the use of Palestinians as human shields in 2002 after an incident in which soldiers forced the neighbor of a suspected militant to knock on his door and deliver their ultimatum to surrender. The militant shot and killed the man.

A left-wing Israeli rabbi who said he too was detained as a human shield when he tried to intervene to free Muhammed Badwan last week said he planned to press charges.

“It is very depressing and very sad to see that we have come to this position where this is what we do. There is disbelief,” said Rabbi Arik Ascherman, head of Rabbis for Human Rights.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/child-shield.html
visit http://www.ifamericansknew.org
http://nchomsky.meetup.com/ Come and meet other Chomsky fans and discuss issues. Chomsky exposes the truth. For example there are the false claims, like that of Netanyahu's claim that the PLO "invented" the hijacking of airplanes and even the killing of diplomats. As is much of Zionist propaganda, it is a lie. The fact is the first airplane hijacking in the Middle East was Israel?s hijacking of a Syrian airways civilian jet in 1954, with the intent ?to get hostages in order to obtain the release of our prisoners in Damascus,? who had been captured on a spy mission in Syria (Prime Minister Moshe Sharett). Sharett accepted the ?factual affirmation of the US State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice.? In October 1956, the Israeli air force shot down an unarmed Egyptian civilian plane, killing 16 people including four journalists, in a failed attempt to assassinate Field Marshall Abdul Hakim Amar, second to President Nasser, at a time when the two countries were not in a state of war. This was a preplanned operation, thus unlike Israel?s downing of a Libyan civilian airliner with 110 killed as it was lost in a sandstorm two minutes flight time from Cairo, towards which it was heading. This February 1973 action took place while Israeli airborne and amphibious forces were attacking Tripoli in northern Lebanon, killing 31 people (mainly civilians) and destroying classrooms, clinics, and other buildings in a raid justified as preemptive. All of this was (and is) dismissed as insignificant, if even noticed. The reaction to Arab terrorism is quite different.

As far as killing of diplomats, in 1948 Zionists killed UN mediator Folke Bernadotte.

See page 73 of Pirates and Emperors, Old and New : International Terrorism in the Real World
Pirates and Emperors, Old and New : International Terrorism in the Real World
<br />
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0896086852/ref=nosim/representativ-20 , also see http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/books/WesternStateTerrorism.html#IntlTerr http://nchomsky.meetup.com/<

Thursday, July 29, 2004

Friday Kirk hands out his new flyer at his class reunion.
reunion flyer

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

do people understand that the US has been exposed as having undermined democracy in foreign countries? Actually the actions of US policy makers have been admitted to.

Interestingly AT THE TIME, the NYT editors praised the overthrow of a democratically elected PM and the installing of the Shah: "The basic themes of internal planning sometimes reach the public, as when the editors of the applauding the overthrow of the parliamentary Mossadegh regime in Iran, observed that "Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism."

And we know it has been admitted to publicly.

"In Iran in the early 1950's the CIA, under President Eisenhower's instructions, helped overthrow the Mossadeg government and re-install the Shah. Given what's happened in Iran since 1979, Mossadeg looks pretty good by comparison. " admits James Woolsey who was director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency


His next sentence I nominate for understatement of the century:

"In retrospect it would have probably been a better idea to let Iran take its own course then -- there might not be so much resentment against the U.S. there now if we had kept our hands off."

OK, so we know the ugliness of US policy makers, why the hell do people say this stupid bullshit about being "anti-AMerican" for pointing out these kinds of facts? They deny that these things are done and attack the people that talk about it with the terms like "un-American".

The bottom line is "In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup d’etat that toppled the democratically elected government of Iran. The government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The aftershocks of the coup are still being felt. "

The U.S. involvement in the fall of Mossadegh was not publicly acknowledged until very recently although many have know for years. In a New York Times article in March 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that "the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."

Given this, don't people who use the term "anti-American" feel stupid? What does it take for people to understand that the US has done some EXTREMELY UGLY, ILLEGAL AND UNDEMOCRATIC things? It is not "anti-American" to insist that US policy makers don't **** over people around the world. We don't want Americans inside the US to screw over fellow Americans, why should we excuse these things when it is done to foreigners?

If the example of screwing over Iran isn't good enough, what the hell would it take? I swear, these people like JG, who INSIST that US polices are motivated by noble respect for the rights of others and of fellow Americans, must have their heads up their asses.


http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/25/1534210

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c02-s02.html
Nominate me, please. www.washingtonpost.com/bestblogs. www.washingtonpost.com/bestblogs.
You wrote, "..media reform, do me one favor, as you are the al qaeda expert, do you think they are worried that democracy will succeed in Iraq and afghanistan or not ? "

I don't think al Qaeda thinks the US is actually intending on establishing true democracy in Iraq, nor should they think that. I don't think there is a reason for anyone to think that the US actually intends on helping to establish real democracy in Iraq.

To believe it you have to believe that it is true that America has "changed course" and is now actually going to help democracy as opposed to helping destroy it which it has for more than 50 years in the Middle East. We already have evidence that US policy makers don't intend on real democracy for Iraq. You can see that US policy makers talk about long term military bases in Iraq.

US policy makers must stop thinking about establishing "the first secure military bases in a client state at the heart of the world's major energy reserves, a powerful lever of world control, as has been understood for sixty years, and a means to subordinate the region more fully to US interests--and the prime motive for the invasion"(1) Establishing military bases is in defiance of the will of Iraqis.

I think it is doubtful that al-qaeda would be any more willing to actually believe the bullshit about the US establishing democracy in Iraq than the average Iraqi. Only 1% of Iraqis actually believe that the goal was to establish democracy and only 5% thought the goal was to help Iraqis.

The actions of the US show contempt for democracy and an unwillingness to help a true democratic process emerge. Iyad Allawi, the PM of Iraq, was selected by the men we selected, the Prime Minster was one of the people the US selected to be on the Iraqi Council.(2) The men we selected to rule Iraq "jumped the gun" when they appointed the Prime Minister. Apparently the UN envoy was actually supposed to select. "A United Nations spokesman has said UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi - who was charged with choosing the interim government - "respects" the nomination."(3) Check Iyad Allawi's background: Saddam's secret police, British intelligence, CIA, alleged terrorist acts against civilians in Baghdad. AFTER he was appointed PM, there have been reports about Iyad Allawi executing six suspected insurgents in an Iraqi police station! The story, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers, is that six prisoners were handcuffed and blindfolded, lined up against a courtyard wall and shot by the Iraqi Prime Minister. (4) I haven't seen the reports in American media, looks like the media is up to there usual games of suppression. Reminds we of the period when the US supported Saddam, the media wasn't eager to talk about his evils THEN. These facts should mean something to anyone that is thinking about actual democracy.

Instead of how the current leaders in Iraq being selected the way they were, which even involved ignoring the agreed upon method, there should have been elections. Even if we accept the idea that elections were not possible, they could have used polls. Polls can come VERY close to what the population of Iraq would vote for. It would be a VERY close approximation of direct elections. It should have been used as the method to select the rulers of Iraq. This is so obvious I don't know how people could not see this.

The selected men are going to use their influence to move the government from true democratic desires and toward the interests of the powerful. Money and power will be used to manipulate the elections in Iraq. what people effectively get o know will be limited as much as the powerful can limit it while keeping some appearances of a "free and open" public forum.
(1) http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040524&c=6&s=forum
(2) http://www.representativepress.org/IraqisWeIdentify.html
(3) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3757431.stm
(4) http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2004/s1155990.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3062897.stm

Monday, July 26, 2004

Hug Noam Chomskyhug Noam Chomsky
Ahmed Nassef: As a Jew who has also lived on a kibbutz in Palestine, have your views changed at all over the years regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue?

Noam Chomsky: My views have not changed. The only thing that has changed is that my views back in the 1940’s were labeled Zionist, and today they are labeled anti-Zionist. Although my views back then did not represent the majority of Zionist Jews, the idea of forming a democratic state for both Jews and Arabs in Palestine was still considered within the mainstream of debate. Now, any talk of a democratic secular state is considered anti-Zionist.

Ahmed Nassef: Many supporters of Israel demand from others that they recognize the right of the State of Israel to exist before engaging in any further discussions. What’s your view on this?

Noam Chomsky: The whole question of recognizing the right of a state to exist was invented solely for Israel. People, on the other hand, have a right to exist. So the people who live on the land—Israelis and Palestinians—have a right to live in security and peace.
You wrote, "But, the fact remains that nobody, not the FBI and not the 9-11 Commission, knows, let alone is able to prove, who was really on those airplanes"
It depends how unreasonable you want to be about what counts as proof. Do you want to be as absurd as the OJ Jury and dismiss DNA evidence?
Remains of 9/11 hijackers identified
LINK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2808599.stm

Remains of 9/11 hijackers identified
Forensic experts in New York say they have identified body parts of two of the 10 hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the New York Medical Examiner's Office, said the identifications had been made using DNA samples provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The FBI had collected the DNA from tiny traces of skin on the steering wheels of vehicles hired by the hijackers and from hair samples recovered from their hotel rooms.

Earlier this month, the FBI provided profiles of all 10 hijackers, including alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta, so their remains could be separated from those of victims.

"No names were attached to those profiles. We matched them, and we have matched two of those profiles to remains that we have," Ms Borakove said.
Remains of 9/11 hijackers identified

Fact is, the hijackers had motive and opportunity and some of their remains have been identified. We see some of them going through the airport on the video just released. Denying that Arabs were on the planes depends on you continuing to dismiss evidence. There should be some internal logic applied to this case. We even have an audio tape of Mohammed Atta as he is hijacking the plane. By our absurd level of proof, nothing could ever be proven.
RE: if you have not read the 9/11 report yet
You wrote, "media reform, this is a reason why you AND the president can BOTH be right about the "reasons why we were attacked"

That is not correct and in I think it is intentional deception on the part of many people perhaps even the person that created the fraudulent letter that has been attributed to bin Laden, I will explain below.

I have been reading bin Laden's words for years and the grievances have been spelled out clearly and are widely shared. This notion that "they say" America "must be converted or destroyed" is a lie.

That part of the report you quote said "As we mentioned in chapter 2" and Chapter 2 is part of the report I have already read and I know what they are referring to: the alleged "binLaden's letter to the American people". (it could be no other source since no other source contains the idea of "convert or be destroyed") says in Chapter 2 the 9/11 Commission writes "Bin Ladin's grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far deeper. To the second question, what America could do, al Qaeda's answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture"

You should look at that, the Commission report is saying that Bin Ladin's reaction to specific U.S. polices "quickly became" something else, something they call "far deeper". "quickly" is obviously false, bin Laden has been talking about these grievances and reacting to them as early as 1991. If we are to believe that his grievances "became" something else then it was plainly not "quick" since the change supposedly happened in 2002. Bin LAden's grievances supposedly "became" something more a year AFTER 9/11. But that all depends on accepting a letter that appeared on the Internet a year after 9/11 was actually written by Bin Laden. One shouldn't simply accept it just because someone gave the letter the title "Bin Laden's letter to America." The letter is a fraud and one that may have been crated to mislead the public about why we are being targeted.

You should wonder why it is just accepted as fact that Bin Laden changed, he has been interviewed for years and has not said such things like you must convert to Islam or be destroyed. Bin Laden has made audiotaped and videotapes statements for years, none of them say anything like this. He has never said anything like this in the years before this mystery letter appeared on the Internet and in the years since. for example an audio tape he made in 2003 (after his supposed change) clearly sates the motives again and of course there is no mention to this idea of "convert or be destroyed": " ... in 1995 , the explosion in Riyadh took place, killing four Americans, in a clear message from the people of that region displaying their rejection and opposition to the American policy of bankrolling the Jews and occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries. The following year, another explosion in Al-Khobar killed 19 Americans and wounded more than 400 of them, prompting them to move their bases from the cities to the desert . Then in 1998 , the Mujahideen warned America to cease their support to the Jews and to leave the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, but the enemy refused to heed this warning, so the Mujahideen, with the ability from Allah , smashed them with two mighty smashes in East Africa . Then again America was warned, but she refused to pay attention to the warnings, so the Mujahideen destroyed the American Destroyer , the USS Cole , in Aden , in a martyrdom operation, striking a solid blow to the face of the American military and at the same time, exposing the Yemeni Government as American agents, similar to all the countries in the region."
and he continues to explicitly state that the evil is the actions of US foreign policies in the world:
"... hiding the Truth, and their stupid and foolish leader, who is elected and supported by his people, denying reality and proclaiming that we (the Mujahideen) were striking them because we were jealous of them (the Americans), whereas the reality is that we are striking them because of their evil and injustice in the whole of the Islamic World, especially in Iraq and Palestine and their occupation of the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries. Upon seeing this, the Mujahideen decided teach them a lesson and to take the war to their heartland. On the blessed Tuesday 11 September 2001 , while the Zionist -American Alliance was targeting our children and our people in the blessed land of Al-Aqsa , with American tanks and planes in the hands of the Jews, and our people in Iraq were suffering from the America's sanctions upon them, and the Islamic world was very far away from establishing Islam properly." - Osama bin Laden ,February 14 ,2003

U.S. Investigators have nearly a decade of statements directly from bin Laden that state the motives for the attacks on the US and US interests. Bin Laden has been interviewed by western journalists and has for several years repeatedly broadcast a common list of grievances, which he cites as the reason for his jihad . Most of these statements have been confirmed as those from bin Laden but at least one hasn't, a letter , purporting to be written by bin Laden, which appeared on the Internet in Arabic. It was reported in a November 24 ,2002 article in The Observer , in an article that cites no intelligence-agency estimates about the likelihood of its authenticity, only using journalists' beliefs that it is really a letter from bin Laden explaining the motivations for the attacks.

Reasons to question the authenticity of this particular letter include:
* a style different from all the interviews
* a strange intro to the letter that acts like the motives have not been stated before.
* lack of any other source that includes as motives either
* "debauchery of Western Civilization " or
* a "call for conversion to Islam of the infidels."

The letter has other obvious problems that indicate it is a fabrication which at point is extremely amateurish. Does anyone take the following seriously?: "Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?" Who ever actually wrote the letter got carried away. And what is this Islam that the writer of the letter "calls us to" "And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language. " But Bin Laden is a fundamentalist Islamic, this letter talks about "total equality" "without regard" to even sex? Who ever wrote the letter was really having fun at that point. The letter, in an outline format that bin Laden has never used, supposedly asks us to do in numbered several things and now "stop supporting Israel" is pushed down to number 4? Come on. The whole style of the letter is a different from everything that is know to have actually come from bin Laden.
(note, I added some of these points to September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack

Friday, July 23, 2004

excerpt from transcript of 'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for July 22

CHRIS MATTHEWS interviewes "ANONYMOUS", the former head of the CIA unit assigned to track Osama bin Laden and author the book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror cover
"ANONYMOUS" spent hours testifying before the 9/11 Commission.

ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris"): Yes, sir. You would have to ask them the question.

Again, it comes down to the fact that the first consideration is not protecting Americans.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, I find this amazing. Can you bottom-line this, sir? I know you want us to buy the book. And that's fair enough. Let's buy the book, "Imperial Hubris." But what is the bottom line here? Why are we not winning?

ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris"): We're not winning because we continue to misidentify the enemy.

America has never had an opponent who has been more clear on why he is fighting us, what he intends to do, and then follows up by doing it. He is motivated by religion. He is not, as we continually say, a criminal or a gangster.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right.

ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris"): He has no intention of destroying our way of life or our liberties or our freedom. He has focused the Muslim world on about six specific U.S. policies which are universally disliked in the Muslim world, whether or not the same proportion of Muslims support bin Laden.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, why does the president continue to blame-say that the motive for this hell that hit us in 2001 is some sort of, I don?t know, some culture clash, when in fact, it is an attack on the United States for some specific policies, keeping troops in Saudi Arabia, backing Israel, all these policies which we clearly accept in this country? (see Bush lies about 9/11 motives)

Some of them I think we could drop, like the Saudi - putting all the soldiers in their holy land. But why doesn't the president clearly state the reasons they're fighting us? Why does he keep mucking it up with the evil ones and they don't like our way of life and all? What good does that do?

ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris"): Well, it hasn't done any good, sir, in the sense that no political leader in this country over the last 15 years has been willing to engage on the issue of policies.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yes.

ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris"): Americans have a hard time believing that they're perceived as anything else than kind and benign.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Oh, come on. Well, let me tell you something. Sitting here, I know there are a lot of our policies which are changeable, correctable and probably wrongheaded, like putting all those troops in Saudi Arabia in a way that was a sacrilege to the people of the country. Why did we do that?

ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris"): We needed on a short-term basis. I thought we probably believed we weren?t going to be there 10 years.? But now we?re in the unfortunate position of occupying the first most holy place in Islam in Arabia.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right.

ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris"): The second most holy in Iraq and the third most holy in the Israelis' hold in Jerusalem.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I know.

Well, a lot of that is intolerable on their side and fixable on our side. Some of it isn't fixable.

Anyway, thank you very much, Mr. ANONYMOUS (author of "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror") .
"An attack of greater magnitude, said Thomas Kean, the Republican chair of the panel, was possible and even probable. "

What is the bottom line? The 9-11 Commission's conclusion is an attack of greater magnitude than the 9/11 is possible and even probable.

Is that really a point the experts agreed on? Yes.
"Every expert with whom we spoke told us an attack of even greater magnitude is now possible and even probable," the panel's Republican chairman, Thomas Kean (search), said. "We do not have the luxury of time."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,126753,00.html

Why is another attack possible and even probable? Because the policies of supporting Israel and propping up other oppressive regimes in the Middle East are more important than the lives of the American people.why does Bush and others lie about the 9/11motives?

Friday, July 02, 2004

So if you are not in favor of Israeli policies you are not a Jew?
Nader ponted out what you are doing too, "ignoring the Israeli peace movement, which is very substantial"
You omit what Nader said about particular Jews that you want to pretend don't exist, "the peace movement is broad indeed. They just put 120,000 people in a square in Tel Aviv. They are composed of former government ministers, existing and former members of the Knesset, former generals, former combat veterans, former heads of internal security, people from all backgrounds. It is not any fringe movement.
"
Mike, your arguemnet rests on ignoring very substancial facts like the fact that there are many Jews that are in agreement agianst the Israeli policies. Clearly you are so fanatical you don't concider them Jews. By definition Nader is not saying "the Jews" do this and that when you makes the point more than once of talking about Jews you prestend don't exist.
Pat Buchanan: Let me start off with foreign policy—Iraq and the Middle East. You have seen the polls indicating widespread contempt for the United States abroad. Why do they hate us?
Ralph Nader: First of all, we have been supporting despots, dictators, and oligarchs in all those states for a variety of purposes. We supported Saddam Hussein. He was our anti-Communist dictator until 1990. It’s also cultural; they see corporate culture as abandoning the restraints on personal behavior dictated by their religion and culture. Our corporate pornography and anything-goes values are profoundly offensive to them.

The other thing is that we are supporting the Israeli military regime with billions of dollars and ignoring both the Israeli peace movement, which is very substantial, and the Palestinian peace movement. They see a nuclear-armed Israel that could wipe out the Middle East in a weekend if it wanted to.

They think that we are on their backs, in their house, undermining their desire to overthrow their own tyrants.
Pat Buchanan:: Then you would say it is not only Bush who is at fault, but Clinton and Bush and Reagan, all the way back?
Ralph Nader: The subservience of our congressional and White House puppets to Israeli military policy has been consistent. Until ’91, any dictator who was anti-Communist was our ally.
Pat Buchanan: You used the term “congressional puppets.” Did John Kerry show himself to be a congressional puppet when he voted to give the president a blank check to go to war?
Ralph Nader: They’re almost all puppets. There are two sets: Congressional puppets and White House puppets. When the chief puppeteer comes to Washington, the puppets prance.
Pat Buchanan:: Why do both sets of puppets, support the Sharon/Likud policies in the Middle East rather than the peace movement candidates and leaders in Israel?
Ralph Nader: That is a good question because the peace movement is broad indeed. They just put 120,000 people in a square in Tel Aviv. They are composed of former government ministers, existing and former members of the Knesset, former generals, former combat veterans, former heads of internal security, people from all backgrounds. It is not any fringe movement.
The answer to your question is that instead of focusing on how to bring a peaceful settlement, both parties concede their independent judgment to the pro-Israeli lobbies in this country because they perceive them as determining the margin in some state elections and as sources of funding. They don’t appear to agree with Tom Friedman, who wrote that memorable phrase, “Ariel Sharon has Arafat under house arrest in Ramallah and Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office.”

Virtually no member of Congress can say that, and so we come to this paradoxical conclusion that there is far more freedom in Israel to discuss this than there is in the United States, which is providing billions of dollars in economic and military assistance.
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_06_21/cover.html