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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (9279)	11/26/2001 11:52:21 AM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 23908

groups.google.com "Nothing would be what it is. Because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise -what it is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?' - Alice in Wonderland WHAT NOW? by William Thomas Rightly or wrongly, Alice had it right. Or, as that great Yogi named Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Confuse people long enough (about 25 seconds for the average TV viewer) - and they will click channels, tune into less arduous distractions, and reset their brains to "snooz" control. It's a time-tested formula. Everyone who runs a scam for personal, political or financial gain relies on their audience's fractured attention to get away with story lines that seem absolutely compelling in the heat of some manufactured moment - but collapse into complete nonsense if we run the tape back and view it frame-by-frame. Take the events Sept. 11, 2001. Absolutely riveting video, relentlessly repeated. Authoritative news anchors looking dazed and grim, throwing out official statements like lifelines to millions of dazed and desperate viewers drowning in shock and disorientation. It couldn't be real, but it had to be true. * * * So we bought it. Or most of it anyway. We didn't ask why intelligence agencies who couldn't catch a whiff of the most complex "hit" since the i nvasion of Normandy knew the names of 19 cremated hijackers and their renal-challenged ringleader within 48 hours of attacks that killed 50,000, no 25,000, no 6,000, no 2,500 people.. We didn't ask how frightened young men who couldn't fly Cessnas could navigate and steer heavy jets into their targets. Or why none of their names turned up on the passenger lists of the four airplanes they were supposed to have commandeered. (Total number of Middle Easterners among 257 passengers and crew: zero.) We didn't ask what the United and American pilots (three of them military veterans) were doing while men armed with quarter-inch knives demanded death to fellow Americans, why their cockpit conversations were never released, why eight indestructible "black boxes" holding the keys to so many questions were rendered "inoperable" while hijackers' paper passports escaped explosions and fire unscathed. We didn't ask why a plane supposedly driven by its passengers into two separate crash sites in the Pennsylvania countryside came apart in mid-air. Or why the president of the United States remained more interested in the story of a pet goat than reports of airliners crashing into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon. We didn't ask why U.S. forces were poised to attack across the Tajikistan border into Afghanistan in an assault announced last June - but could not scramble a single fighter to defend the U.S. capitol before three airliners hit their targets on a sunny morning in September. We didn't ask why the CIA met with an ailing Osama bin Laden in an American hospital as the biggest British battle fleet since the Falklands sailed for waters off Afghanistan, why Washington gave the Taliban $43 millions in May, or why the FBI and Attorney General of the United States repeatedly ignored warnings and blocked investigations into the impending attacks. We didn't ask what the CIA was doing in the upper echelons of Big Banks that profited hugely from "short-selling" United and American Airlines stocks in the final days before someone dialed 9.11 We didn't ask why the head of the WTC arson investigation told reporters there were "explosive devices" in the building, why so few survivors were burned, or why New York firefighters were dragged away from Ground Zero just when the site was becoming safe and they were getting close to the bottom of things. * * * We did not ask because we were not told what had really happened. Like good Germans in Hitler's heyday, we looked the other way when more than 1,100 not-quite-white people bearing Middle Eastern names were thrown into U.S. prisons, interrogated, abused, held without notifying their families or lawyers - without ever being charged with terrorist acts. We were sure it couldn't happen to us. Anthrax held us enthralled. Instead of asking what a weaponized" strain of a decades old "Made In The USA" bacteria was doing in silent letter bombs, we clamored for risky antidotes and even more dangerous vaccines without stopping to consider that anthrax is not contagious, easily treated, rarely fatal - and that bee stings pose a far more serious threat to most Americans. Like frightened Germans after the Reichstag fire, we demanded that authorities "do something". They did. A Constitution generations of Americans had given their lives to defend was suspended. Laws were quickly passed permitting surveillance, assets seizure, arrest and detention of suspects" - without formal charges or judicial oversight. Evidence will be sealed. Special tribunals will hear these cases. Forcible quarantine and inoculations are next. A president who told Americans the day he "took" office - "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator" - appointed himself supreme ruler of a his new Supreme National Security Council. A hundred thousand troops were called up for "internal security". And we said thank God, not realizing that soon perhaps we could be busted for that, too. * * *

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (9279)	11/26/2001 1:08:05 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Actually they announced that the 3 countries are IRAQ,Samolia,and Syria. No big surprise to me. I expect that if Egypt does not shape up they will be on the short list too. In effect, under a policy known within the administration as "coercive diplomacy", the Iraqi leadership will be told to readmit the expelled United Nations weapons inspectors or face military attack. The next military assault would be much wider than the occasional air strikes launched by US and British jets enforcing the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Mr Bush also cited Syria as a state that needed to "take a hard look at some of the groups in their country". Other military objectives in the widening of the campaign against terrorism include a suspected al-Qa'eda training camp in Somalia detected by reconnaissance planes. The CIA continues to believe that there are al-Qa'eda cells in Yemen and Sudan, despite public moves by both governments to satisfy Washington that they were taking action. Strikes against those countries could follow the completion of the Afghanistan mission. news.telegraph.co.uk