The specific Afghan data appears to be a bit stale too, from sometime in October 2005. A lot has happened since then as well.

I love polling in war zones - it's a darned if you do and darned if you don't scenario for the pollster. Having just attended a meeting with an Afghan representative of an NGO I'm associated with, he was quite eloquent in expressing the frustration of maintaining progress in economic growth because of the aggressive presence of the war lords who destroy any crop production except the profitable poppy. The fact many of these war lords are paid by the US for "security" measures makes it an uneven battle for sure. It is distressing that Canadians are not given an opportunity to question our role in a region where we are looked upon as an extension of the rather ill-reputed US militia; - as such, many of our "former" peace keepers will die a death sanctioned by our tax funds on behalf of Harper's gov't boot-licking of a mad administration suffering delusions of grandeur.

Harper seems to think the we the lowly masses who supply the sons and daughters, the money and the reputation of OUR country, should have nothing to say about what goes on. Because we have troops already there of course we support them but that does not mean we can not debate and discuss Foreign Policy!
If he insists on prolonging the mission the next story will be - oh we can't pull out now or all will have been in vain. And you can bet there will soon be a full fledged campaign to create fear within the country. The biggest thing we should fear is the enemy within - we have had the benefit of seeing this movie already played just next door. Get people scared enough and they will agree to all kinds of crazy things and we cannot let this happen in Canada.

Exactly, fiat lux.

Should correct what I wrote above. The Taliban poll is from October, the others are more recent. Still, as observed by others, face-to-face polling is likely only possible in a few restricted areas unless the pollsters are donning flak jackets and circulating through the countryside something a trifle difficult to visualize.

I think there's an interesting disconnect developing too since information came out yesterday that the Afghan justice system is in the middle of trying to prosecute one of their citizens for switching religions.

Politics and culture, as always, makes for strange bedfellows, I hope that Peewee's call to Kabul will have straightened that out.

polling numbers are a real joke,the only numbers we should be concerned about are the number of body bags holding our young soldiers who were sent over there by rogue politicians WITHOUT THE COUNTRY'S CONSENT.

NO DEBATE,NO VOTE,SEND THEM OVER TO DO DIRTY WORK FOR THE OIL LOBBY,UNCLE SAM'S WORK AT HIS BEST...

Perhaps the return of 4.5 million former refugees to Afghanistan (despite a UN plea to stay out for now because they can't handle the influx of Afghan citizens) could be considered the poll that counts? They are voting with their feet.

Sorry Mr. Reid - Canada's role is Peacemaker, not Peacekeeper. Get it?

hate to agree with you lefties, but we need to get the hell out of there. canadian kids shouldn't be dying for afghanis. at some point you have to take responsibility for your own affairs.

there aint no ,left /right politics, when it comes to our kids/soldiers, concern.

So we should just pack up and leave? I sure the Taliban will be grateful, they pine for the good old days when the rule of medieval law was imposed, by young males with little education. Certainly it was “safer”, because everyone was terrified of them, and of course you wouldn’t have to worry about being strangled by a kid flying a kite, because any kid doing so would be beaten. It would be nice to remove the warlords, but that will create a vacuum that will be filled by someone even worse. This country has been raped and trampled over the last 30 years, it’s going to take a t least 10 years before they can even stand on their own much less walk. They need to build a Judicial & legal system, a semi-useful police force, national military. Not to mention a decent land tenure system, communication system, road network, health services, food and water distribution to name a few others.

People here talk a lot about making the world a better place, but don’t want to get their hands dirty, newsflash: If you want to make the world a better place you are going to get covered in a lot of muck. Without the army their, NGO’s and private citizens will be lying in the ditches with a bullet in the back of the head from the Taliban, because the Taliban know that the real battle is going to be over things like roads, medical care and education which is way they attack anyone working on those projects. Peace marches in Vancouver are nothing more than feel good exercises that do little if anything at all. If you want to help Afghanistan donate to the charity of your choice to provide schools, health clincs.

Canada is doing a pretty decent job there and the military portion of it is only one prong of a three prong policy. As I said before, I doubt that many Canadians have a clear understanding of what we are doing there and even less could properly define peacekeeping. We are lucky with our soldiers, they can fight hard when they need to, but are ready to help someone in need when they can.

The only party that has any right to demand a debate is the Bloc, as the NDP squandered their opportunity when Layton was in the sack with Mr Dithers.

If you want Canada to have a separate foreign policy than Afghanistan is a good place to develop it, the Liberals certainly didn’t bother to, in fact what little policy they had seemed only designed to ensure that they got re-elected.

Is it perfect? No, there is no perfection in the world

here's mister military sycophant spouting his american rhetoric about patriotism and policies to be endured by countries that hate the west.

colin,go get your buddy rocky and have yourselves a little fun in the backrooms,you've shown us all before how pathetic canadians like yourself run to americans for guidance.

Just as G.W.Bush wanted to be a "war" President, so perhaps, did Stephen Harper desire to be a "war" PM - both thirsting for similar esteem in which Winston Churchill is held - no matter the bloody cost.

Churchill is not such a hero to all, The stench remains following Rudolf Hess's flying to the U.K. early in the 2nd World War, allegedly with peace proposals.

What was hidden by his unjustly-long imprisonment until his death?

Ok, I give up, what?

Well said.

I think there is a disconnect going on here among so-called progressives: to make a better world sometimes requires fighting oppressors.

Why do some people have a problem fighting militant theocrats who blow up schools for women, ban music, set up terrorist training camps to export their jihad, etc? It sounds like some so-called progressives want human rights as long as they don't have to pay for them or struggle to promote them.

The Canadian armed forces are engaged in a program in cooperation with CIDA to protect and supply farmers who wish to switch from poppies to other crops. I am very eager to see how CIDA and the military could cooperate to promote Afghani economic development.

Our role is Afghanistan is not simply at the behest of the Americans -- it is a UN-supported mission operated through NATO.

That first casualty of war, TRUTH, maybe?

Afghan Judge Says He Won't Bow to Pressure on Conversion Case

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan's judiciary will not bow to outside pressure over the fate of a man who faces the death penalty for converting to Christianity, a judge dealing with the case said on Thursday.

U.S. President George W. Bush said he was deeply troubled by the case of Abdur Rahman, who an Afghan judge said this week had been jailed for converting from Islam to Christianity and could face death if he refused to become a Muslim again.

Death is one of the punishments stipulated by sharia, or Islamic law, for apostasy. The Afghan legal system is based on a mix of civil and sharia law.

``Afghanistan is an Islamic country and its judiciary will act independently and neutrally,'' Supreme Court judge Ansarullah Mawlavizada told Reuters.

``No other policy will be accepted apart from Islamic orders and what our constitution says,'' Mawlavizada said, adding he was saddened by the international outcry.

The case is sensitive for President Hamid Karzai who depends on foreign troops to battle Taliban and al Qaeda militants, and aid to support the economy, but also has to take into consideration views of conservative proponents of Islamic law.

Several countries supporting Afghanistan with troops and aid, including the United States, Canada, Italy and Germany, as well as the United Nations, have raised concern about Rahman's fate and called for freedom of religion.

Rahman, 40, has yet to be formally charged.

A prosecutor has raised questions about his mental state and a cabinet minister said he would not be executed if he were found to be unstable.

Rahman told a preliminary hearing last week he became a Christian while working for an aid group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan 15 years ago.

``I'm not an apostate. I'm obedient to God but I'm a Christian, that's my choice,'' Rahman told the hearing. He also said he was not mentally ill and would defend himself.

Analysts say the case could hinge on interpretations of the country's new constitution, which says ``no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam and the values of the constitution.''

It also says Afghanistan will abide by international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines freedom of religion, including the freedom to change one's religion.

``DEEPLY TROUBLING''

The United States, which counts Karzai as a key ally, has raised the case with Afghanistan.

``It is deeply troubling that a country we helped liberate would hold a person to account because they chose a particular religion over another,'' Bush said on Wednesday.

``We have got influence in Afghanistan and we are going to use it to remind them that there are universal values,'' he said.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Karzai assured him in a telephone call ``that respect for human and religious rights will be fully upheld.'' Canada has 2,500 troops in the southern city of Kandahar and commands a NATO mission there.

Mawlavizada, who presided over the preliminary hearing, said proceedings against Rahman would begin in the next few days.

``We will try to see if he converts to Islam, for Islam is the religion of compassion. But if he does not, Islamic law will be enforced,'' he said, adding that Karzai would have the final say.

Death sentences have to be upheld by the president in the past.

The controversy comes weeks after 11 Afghans were killed in riots over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad published in European newspapers.

I think truth was a casualty in the wars of the 1700 - 1800's. Never to show it's face again...

good posting G West,this is how religions work,OVER THERE

we have different ideas and want them exported,like the CHRISTIAN RIGHT WINGERS.

think back in history,THE HOLY WARS and ask where the riches/jewels/etcetra went.

and who were the warriors?

DESTABILIZATION IN THAT AREA PROVIDES ONLY BENEFITS TO THE AMERIKANS...no one else,cause the religious factions will never disapear.

But before anyone gets too huffy, Christians should also be aware of the results of this Pew Poll about attitudes concerning torture - you can find it here:
http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2006a/032406/032406h.htm

It's a complex world. Mr Harper would be wise to acknowledge it before deciding that his philosophy has all, or even many, of the answers.

good christians/bad christians...good muslims/bad muslims...good buddists/bad buddists...etc...etc

good right wingers? good occupation?good brainwashing?good self interest groups?good bullets?bad bullets?

WOW ! what a confusing situation !

where is the common sense,we say we all have ?

reading for all . . . . .

The Jihadis and their alternatives

http://www.americanthinker.com/index.php

Please tell us why.

Afghanistan already is unstable, and has been unstable for decades. The instability created a vacuum for jihadists to set up training camps and impose a severe form of Islam upon other Afghanis. It also created a regional warlord system of governance (if you can call it that), in which growing poppies became the preferred crop.

Instability in Afghanistan is not in Afghani interests, our interests, nor the American interests, nor the world's interests (as shown by UN support for our participation).

i guess you are not part of the inustrial military complex,start you with general motors,steve p and you can find the rest yourself,if you can do a searc properly.

then you can go back to the russians involment in the area ,WHO SOLD THE AFGHANIS AND EVERYBODY ELSE WEAPONS ? THAT'S RIGHT,THE AMERIKANS

i see you don't read much...try it in the right light and you may be educated(enlightened was just to puny for such as serious subject)

war ,is BIG BUSINESS at its best

So Haraldkann
What is your solution?

C'mon Harald -- let's see less personal slights and more real arguments ... if you have any, that is.

1) Vague references to Ike's military-industrial complex can be applied in many ways. Please be specific with how it applies to Afghanistan. Is there no justification for use of force, ever?

2) Yes, we supported those who fought the Soviets during the Cold War. This was a good thing. The Soviets were responsible for more mass murders than Hitler. Yes, in the post cold-war period some of those we supported vs the Soviets came back to bite us, but that is reality in a multi-polar world: when an enemy that brings us together no longer poses a threat, other rivalries emerge. Should we not have resisted the murderous Soviet regime?

3) The US aren't the only powers who sell weapons in Afghanistan. I'd be interested to see how many Russian or Chinese-made kalishnikovs are used by jihadists vs American-made weapons. I doubt that the Americans have a corner on this market. Moreover, the argument that the Americans want instability in Afghanistan to sell weapons is lame: Afghanis are so broke they can't pay the high prices the arms manufacturers would demand. So it isn't in their commercial interests (looking only at selling weapons) to have instability in Afghanistan, either.

So do you have something to say Harald, or do you expect us readers to fill in all the blanks? I suspect you just want to shout at us in capital letters again =^)

Uh, no. The CIA funded armed and trained what were then called freedom fighters or mujahadeen and helped set up training camps. Their radical and severe form of Islam was seen as an asset in the fight against godless communism. Heck, they even made an appearance in a James Bond movie as the good guys. How easily people forget. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA simply abandoned them.

The problem in Afghanistan is that it appears to be less and less about helping Afghans create a stable and functioning society, and more and more about a training ground for counter-insurgency military operations. If the "west" including Canada and the US, were truly interested in rebuilding Afghanistan, then they wouldn't have used a proxy military of warlords and drug dealers take the country away from the Taliban. They'd also pour massive amounts of resources into the country, on the scale of a Marshall Plan, to rebuild it.

That hasn't happened. Instead we have token military force deployments, doing photo op missions for spare-tire attired politicians, along with a more focused emphasis on counter-insurgency training. Sure NGOs are making a go of it, but the fact they feature so prominently in the excuses people make for our presence in Afghanistan, just underlines how little real commitment developed countries and particularly their governments have in making Afghanistan a peaceful and stable society.

A Kalishnikov is a helluva weapon; I understand they're even making them in the states these days.

The thing is that it's just never, ever, simple - and once you start shooting all the great plans and organization and theories go out the window. That's what history really teaches us, doesn't it?

Whatever moral authority the west had when it went into Afghanistan - I won't even get into the complexities of why or who's responsible for the Taliban - it has totally squandered in Iraq.

And now, with the situation in Afghanistan going sideways again, given the nature of the regime we've ended up supporting - (Karzai can't even exert any influence over his own judiciary for purely pragmatic reasons) - Canada - who always thinks our motives are so incredibly pure - is running around with General Hillier 'killing scumbags'. Man, there aren’t enough Hilliers and there are too many scumbags – it ain’t gonna work.

Where is the stability going to come from? I don't have those answers but the evidence I see right now doesn't give me much confidence that our noble leader does either. Seems to me the people who support our continued involvement over there are the ones a little short of 'good' answers just now. Why does the left always get saddled with proving a negative? We’ve never had the power to make these kinds of decisions in the first place. Surely the onus is on those who support the military option.

Are we going to help garrison the whole Middle East?
Maybe it'd just be better to nuke em all!

i would suggest as many have,GET OUT .

let them hack at each other for another thousand years,keep them corraled and the ones that want to join our society,let them come.

they should be free to practice their religion,over there if it is violent

and if muslims here are not violent,they may practice their religion here as they already do.

any problems with muslims(any new citizen) here,DEPORT THEM.

We want only peaceful citizens,we want our soldiers as protectors of our way of life,not thugs at the call of rogue politicians drumming up business for their friends in the oil cartels

simplistic,but over the years there would be fewer and fewer enemies,and they could be taken care of with surgical skill if need be.

i don't see you to worried about all the african children dieing of starvation and their numbers are horrific,then again there is no oil in their back yards and you have stolen all their diamond and gold,turned their countries into graveyards.

so,you can ignore children dieing,then it should not be to hard ignoring the taliban or some other whacko outfit,chopping up their religious or political enemies.

step out of their country,they land up in a body bag...

BUT THEY GOTS OIL THERE DUBYA...AN WE WANTZ IT

so even if any solution were to be put forward ,it aint gonna happen...

so you see,we just wasted time here,just like our troops are wasting time over there...

it's BIG BUSINESS...NOTHING MORE.

steve p ,i can see you are one of those that never learned how to colour inside the lines or how to connect the dots.

and making assumptions to identity makes you sound like colin or even worse that mental midget rocky.
then again,you TANKNET whackjobs have never left this site judging from your pathetic postings.

call me whatever you want,just don't call me one of your kind...

so,you can ignore children dieing

Of course you don't "see me" harald -- we've never met and we've never discussed starvation in Africa. Once again, you put words into my mouth and lie about me.

James wrote:

Regarding the importance of investing in Afghanistan, I totally agree with you.

The issue of proxy warlords is more complex. My understanding is that it was cheaper and easier to pay off warlords & get them (even temporarily) on side than to fight them. So we are in a difficult situation when our Northern Alliance "allies" promote poppy cultivation ...

In sum, I don't think we have a perfect solution, but I do believe that order is required for prosperity, and some prosperity is required for somewhat-liberal democracies to be effective. So we need order, and asking the Taliban nicely doesn't seem to work -- they are too busy blowing up statues of buddha and making sure girls don't go to school. Moreover, if NATO in the cold war is at least partly responsible for arming the Taliban, doesn't this make us especially responsible for the Taliban's excesses? Responsible, I mean, in the sense of doing something about it?

the only people responsible are the empire builders...ENGLAND,UNITED STATES,RUSSIA...

let them wholly accept their responsibilities.

Steve P
I think the situation in Afghanistan is a long way from prosperity.
Do some hard analysis; look at what American legislators promised right after the initial war with the Taliban ended. Check out what was agreed in aid for the rebuilding effort and then look at what happened when it came to time to actually deliver the bucks - virtually nothing was delivered. Why? Because the right wing government in the US doesn't think past its own pork barrel funded ass, that's why.

This is no moral crusade we're on. Wars almost never are. If you wanted to argue that Afghanistan was savable before the Pentagon decided it could reshape the whole Middle East by a light-weight gambit in Iraq you might have a case. However, once they started after Saddam's ass they forgot all about those poor kids in Afghanistan and the ladies in burkes and now you want Nato to take up the slack for the failure of the US to meet its commitments . Hey, the NGOs and the idealists do a great job. But if you want to make over a region like the Middle East you're going to have to go in heavy and hard and plan to stay for 20 years - maybe more.

You're going to have to mobilize the whole economy and the whole population and you're going to have to get a lot busier with the printing press too - a $9 trillion debt isn't going to come close to covering it. I'm not sure that's the best way to deliver prosperity to anyone.

That's a crusade - which is what Bush still thinks he's on - and we all know how those other crusades turned out. Look at Libya for a better example of changing the way a regime behaves – and don’t be sucked in by those who pretend that all the progress there happened after 9/11. Check the dates and the archives of the New York Times and you’ll realize that Ghadaffi had his teeth pulled long before the 2 towers collapsed.

Since I'm stupid, harald, why don't you help me understand you. Heaping ridicule on the ignorant isn't sporting ... =^)

let them wholly accept their responsibilities.

You forgot to mention the jihadists.

Even if you think we should chart a different course today, I think we are also responsible for much of what happens in Afghanistan, since we have been a major participant in Britain's imperial wars. And we were involved, through NATO, in the Cold War.

Once again, no arguments, just personal attacks.

Stupid, stupid humans... While the Islamic states tend to be vulnerable to extremism so to is the west. Just in the opposite direction. While you can somehow whip a jihaddist into enough of a frenzy that he'll strap a bomb to himself, in the west you have the dumbing or numbing of the general population to the point where they'll vote for a George Bush..... twice. It's quite likely that 99% of all humanity on the planet only want to live in peace. So what's with the other 1%? Greedy, power hungry, driving the economic bus right over the cliff. Controlling the media to the point where there is no truth in journalism anymore. It's pointless to even read it.

G West:

Agreed!

You saw me coming a mile away =^)

I do think the Bush administration erred by trying to do everything at once without sufficient global support. W doesn't have the patience of his father when it comes to building an international coalition and sticking to the terms of a UN mandate (however flawed).

We agree again. It is hubris to think that NATO & the UN can reform the region in a couple of years. I'm still not convinced this is not a worthy goal ... I'm just worried that we as a society aren't willing to pay for it, despite the better world, greater freedom and prosperity it could bring.

Interesting point ... I'm not up on Libya's recent changes. What do you think encouraged the reform in Libya?

once again ,no arguement,just personal attacks.

funny,why reply to statements of those responsible if there is NO SUBSTANCE

small wonder at the depth of your knowledge,you call that debate when you mouth your political rhetoric,but others it is no substance ?

yet you still reply ?

It isn't partly responsible, the CIA was the prime driver. But now NATO isn't doing anything about it, beyond propaganda efforts for public consumption. Special forces style military action is easy and exciting next to the complicated and massive responsibilities of truly rebuilding a nation.

The thing is you don't get security and peace by blowing stuff up, by randomly murdering civilians while pursuing insurgents, by putting boots to throats. All those actions will accomplish is to make more enemies. The longer Canadians perform a combat role, the greater the likelyhood of those things happening, or worse. A superior military force can scatter and kill some of the enemy, but it can't defeat it. Depending only on violence is pathetically lazy, shortsighted, and just plain dumb.

NATO appears to be working very hard to turn Afghanistan into a lost cause. That is quite an accomplishment considering that the majority of the Afghan population would undoubtedly prefer just about anything to the Taliban and drug dealing warlords. Doing just enough so that TV cameras have something to film is just as bad, perhaps even worse, than doing nothing at all.

I just want to know, if it is ok for a Canadian to shoot a Taliban because his politics are old-fashioned, even brutal?

Is it wrong for a Taliban to fight back against a foreign invader / occupier ?

I am not sure, but I recall reading the Geneva convention and I vaguely recall it being ok (non-illegal) to fight against invaders. Is this true ?

If so, are we actually violating international law by occuppyng a foreign country and hunting down their former government ?

We will have to request all of our beneficiary nations to grant immunity against war crimes for our soldiers, upon threat of aid discontinuance, like the US did before they invaded Iraq ?

Do we need to withdraw from the International Court of Justice, as did the US before they invaded Iaq ?

I mean hell, if were gonna go postal on some mo'fckg Talibanis, we may as well do it all proper and legal.

i wish the big boys had some of the common sense of common folk like jwstewart...

right on...if we are going to go postal better get some legal advice,eh .

then again we watched george bush on television being told about problems to come with katrina and what did that little moron do ? SQUAT

and i don't think harper is any deeper than bush.

peewee rambo and george dubya,wow ! inspiration to the masses these two.

and puppets of big business...

and i bet they both have ghost writers on staff right now,penning their historical slant on ruling the world....er ,country.

And since we were close allies of the CIA during the Cold War, doesn't that make us responsible, too?

The difficulty then, is how to stop jihadists (many of whom are not even from Afghanistan, so we cannot say they are simply local liberators) from killing people and establishing a harsh theocratic rule that doesn't respect human rights. We have Afghani allies who are depending upon us for security while they put it on the line & try to rebuild their state. People like Afghani parliamentarian and anti-warlord Malalai Joya and millions of others are counting on us.

Agreed! That's why violence must be supplemented by massive infrastructure investments. Hopefully our investment in soldiers can be reduced, and the investment in schools, roads, power and hospitals increased ...

I`ve heard rumours that Hamid Karzai has ties to the Narco/trade(profits from)..I can`t substantiate this. If this were true..couldn`t the Canadian/Nato troops be seen to actually be a hired
mercenary army for the protection of his interests?

The Taliban Wahabbists are largely a creation of the Pakistani Secret service/military of Musharref. The House of Saud are Wahhabist(sp? supporters of the Pakistan madrassas from where the Taliban originate.

Iran(Shiite) was initially supporting the U.S in defeating the Taliban and capturing Osama.
Osama primarily wants to see the House of Saud decorating the lampposts in Riyadh...

I guess where I`m trying to go with this is..
Don`t the Canadian People deserve a very clear and comprehensive explanation of exactly why we have put so many of our own in harms way. Clearly..what is our purpose? Whose interests are we really serving.. all jingoism and freedom and democracy mumbo jumbo aside.
Rick Hillier and Canadian Career militarists obviously relish seeing and testing themselves in real combat and the experience and possible commendations they can add to their military portfolios...

Haraldkann

Thank you, so your position is to turn your back and let them hack away at each other? Very progressive thinking I must say it certain shows your humanity. From you ferocity of your posts I would say that your spots are showing.

By the way a search of this site will indicate that I have indeed raised the issue of the people in Africa and in fact it is presently the Africa Union that does not want the West involved on the ground in places like Dafur. Personally I would not be to sad if our boys in ski masks paid a visit to the leader of the “Lord’s Resistance Army” and helped him with his journey to his maker, at least the kids there might be able to sleep in their homes for a change.

G west and others

While I concur that activities in the region during the Cold war left a lot to be desired, can we allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the past into doing nothing? Look at Rwanda where everyone did nothing. If you say look at our past actions and learn from it, then I agree. NATO and Europe have not honoured much of their pledges made during those early days, Canada for it’s credit has stepped up to the bar and has been one of the biggest contributors to Afghanistan, in money, blood, sweat and tears. I have no shame or regret about us being there, it is going to be a long and tough road and it will not go completely as planned, but if we give them enough stability so they can move forward on their own it will be worth.

People like to say it is a finite planet, they are right you can not ignore your neighbour plight, because it will become yours sooner or later.

bob the cat,you echo what so many have said before and all who agree are nodding their affirmation.

your last statement is so on the mark,building up a resume for the general and his bootlickers.
yes,that's what mommies and daddies in canada want to hear,hillier beefing up the resume at your expense,scratch one bright eyed soul for the sake of hilliers resume,what's that there are more souls on the way..gonna be some resume!

and colin,i noticed you still cannot read,having followed your posts for the last couple of months it's hard to remember anything of your past posts because there are so many,as has been noted by others.reading my last post and my last line ,it was evident that you did not grasp the meaning.

i noted,that even doing something we thought that was of merit,it would be to no avail,because the business of war will never cease...so give your righteous indignation a holiday and learn how to read,i know you say you read a gazillion books a week but that doesn't mean squat if you dont understand what is in them and i dont just mean the ,table of contents.

G West

Rwanda where everyone (including Canada) did nothing is not a really similar comparison to Afghanistan.

The Taliban regime was firmly entrench, as compared to the Hutus and Tutsis who were historically opposing cultures, and on the brink of civil war, hence the peacekeeping effort.

You may contend that there was an incipient civil war in Afghanistan, but in truth the Northern Alliance et al merely coattailed on the US invasion.

Most importantly, international law requires that UN members intervene to stop genocide, whereas no such genocide was present in Afghanistan.

In reality, the fundamental basis for invading Afghanistan was self-interest in the US's security (our own too, possibly). Nonetheless it is hardly the humanitarian rescue effort a trip to Kigali would have been.

If their plight will become ours, does that mean we will be occuppied ?

Since 9/11 was an inside job, the whole reason for the attack on Afghanistan was bogus. Let's not restrict our discussion about the many details about why our being there is wrong. It is the root we must expose.

For those of you in doubt, see st911.org/
and before you dismiss my statement out of hand remember, nobody can break the laws of physics.
The towers collapsed only less than 10 seconds more than FREE-FALL. That is a controlled demolition!

The hypnotic spell of false consensus is breaking down...CNN allowed a decent discussion
of the 9/11 truth movement after Charlie Sheen's appearance on the Alex Jones show.
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/march2006/230306Sheen_CNN.htm

Print media and MSNBC are calling him a nut.....but nobody is reading newspapers anymore....and nobody believes the US administration anymore about anything.

'Since 9/11 was an inside job, the whole reason for the attack on Afghanistan was bogus.' can you say whacko?

jwstewart
I've been busy so I'm not quite sure who brought up Rwanda - it certainly wasn't me - I think it is any kind of a parallel for the situation in Afghanistan (except as a moral lesson) so I'll leave it for others to deal with.

I don't think you understood what I was trying to say. Re Afghanistan: If you argue that intervention was justified there - that seems to be what you're saying - then it was:
a) to capture Osama bin Laden, and
b) to punish the Taliban because they were sheltering him.
Is that fair?

No mention of the women and children and religious extremists at the outset, right?
SO, what's the real truth? Why did the West go into Afghanistan? You tell me? Right up to the day the bombs started to fall Bush said all he wanted was for the Taliban to surrender Osama - remember?

But they sure didn't get Osama and the Taliban seem to have resurrected themselves. And the bucks they'd promised for reconstruction - major money when the whole program started - never got out of Congress.

The point is, all the humanitarian stuff is brought up later because the powers that be want to make sure they can convince simple minded good people back home that they're actually sacrificing their treasure and their children for a worthwhile cause.

If you're going to ask anybody to put his life on the line it seems to me it’s contingent upon the person who's doing the asking to be at least minimally honest about the real reasons - or lack of them. In Rwanda, the moral sensibilities of our leaders seem to have been in neutral. Ask yourself why?

You need to find the answers and not rely on me to tell you. They're out there. And don't come back to me and blame Israel, ‘cause that's crap. Bush had the hots for Saddam from the word go, the Israelis didn't have to twist his arm - he was more than capable of making his own reasons up.

And check out the Libya connection – there are other ways to deal with brutal tyrants. Unless you’re prepared to buckle on your six shooter and head off in all directions at once, shooting your way through these difficulties isn’t gonna work. And it’s especially corrupt if we’re willing to sit around here and pretend we’re doing the Lord’s work while somebody else is doing the dying, don’t you think? Why do you think Harper looks so ridiculous when he plays soldier? Disgusting.

Nana
I'm sorry, I hate to criticize a grandma, I liked you better when I thought you were channeling Zola - I think reality is crazy enough without succumbing to that kind of stuff. I'm outta here for a while - Phd sometimes just stands for piled high and deeper!

Honestly, people, when the Afghanis support our soldiers being there more than we do that's something to worry about. This isn't Iraq, and as much damage as wars do, sometimes they are good and necessary. We can't just generalize this and most of all we can't just ignore it because it's something we don't agree with. The soldiers are doing something to be proud of, and it's a good thing we're over there.

Oh, and jwstewart:
Canada and Belgium both sent peacekeepers to Rwanda, and Romeo Dallaire wanted to use what he had to save the country, but the UN refused. We didn't do enough, but we didn't do nothing either.

Nana,

I don't have a problem believing that the 911 commission didn't tell us everything about the twin towers. But I think it is a horrendous and paranoid stretch to conclude that therefore the Bush administration did it themselves. Many of us disagree with Bush's politics, but I have a hard time believing in the "inside job" theory without better evidence.

For a different perspective (that doesn't believe the official line) and a critique of the so-called scholars for truth might I suggest:

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/st911/index.html

And for those who are arguing in favour of public discussion of our role in Afghanistan, wasn't this performed by the Liberals (in cahoots with the NDP) last fall? Minister Graham toured Canada to discuss our role in Afghanistan.

nana,don't listen to g west,you provided a good giggle.

i wonder what charlie was snorting/smoking/ingesting ?

that was a real giggle,now that should really open canadian eyes to who we are following.

the looney toones writers.............

obciously should be 'no parallel' in my post above not 'any'

Sept 9 2001..Al Qaeda assassinates Ahmed Masood.
Masood was the Tajik Afghan leader against the Soviets, Pakistan and then the Taliban.
He had the "connect" and respect of the Afghan people and would have united the many various factions against the Taliban and stabilized the country.

After the defeat of the Soviets the C.i.a. abandoned Masood..he had to retreat to the Mountains (Northern Alliance) and fight a guerilla war.

Bin Laden knew he needed him out of the way.

The U.S. again abandoned Afghanistan after removing the Taliban..and went into Iraq. If Masood were still alive..and the U.S. hadn`t gone into Iraq..the Afghan "mission" may have suceeded.

I suspect the planning of 9/11 wasn`t an "inside" job..but they had pretty detailed information about what was coming and let it play out..it played right into their hands.

bob the cat
You're right that Masood would have been an asset to the US in Afghanistan; would having him along have helped catch the main man?

Tactically, the Afghan project was a completely different operation and the yanks can't have it both ways. You can't use proxies to do the dirty work on the ground (which was their method) and then complain too much when the results you wanted don't pan out - Osama gets away.

But, I think the US had a lot of goodwill in Afghanistan after they booted the Taliban. Instead of pouring in the bucks and aid they'd promised and creating an example in an Islamic state of what American cash, knowhow and good will could really do for the region, they basically reneged and decided they were up for the bigger project Bush had been thinking about ever since he 'won' the presidency. They decided Afghanistan was small potatoes and now we're there trying to pick up the pieces while Bush chokes on Iraq.

Snap out of the hypnosis you're all in and examine the evidence....unless you're all really just gatekeepers.

Enjoy this video, and then ask yourself if you really want to continue feeding the delusion about guys with boxcutters getting their orders from a guy in a cave.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5137581991288263801&q=loose+change

G
Yes...consolidating that good will at that time would have been the way to go..I think it had a good chance of success.

And yes..we and the Europeans will try to clean up the mess.

I just don`t understand how the U.S.` staunch allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can at the same time finance and support the Taliban..who will soon be taking a toll on Canadian lives.

And yes..the AK-47..is a hell of a gun. They make `em in Pakistan. Knew an American Military guy who really liked `em..said they were really durable..the American equivalent (Colin knows this stuff better than anyone I`m sure.. is it the M-16?) is more accurate but is susceptible to moisture or sand jamming it. The U.S. Army guy said you could throw an ak into the mud ..jump up and down on it ..pick it up and still blast away.
They had Kalyshnikov (sp?) and the American designer of the U.S. gun on together on A&E being interviewed while "experts" put the two weapons thru tests. The Ak won the contest.

WW2 was started when a group of SS soldiers, under the command of a junior officer, Alfred Naujock, dressed in Polish uniforms, attacked a German radio station in Danzig, now Gdansk, as an act of provocation. This gave Hitler an excuse to attack Poland.

My native Hungary attacked Soviet Russia, following German orders, when the "Soviets" used a few German planes with German markings to drop some bombs on a 2 or 3 North Hungarian cities, killing a few.

Then there was the Boston Tea Party......

I don't claim to know who attacked the WTC towers, but the official version is a pack of lies. It was a well documented, controlled demolition, and the Pentagon wasn't hit by an airliner. No evidence whatsoever and no independent investigations were launched.

Even the crash of a small plane usually gets more expert investigation, lasting for months and years, than 9/11 even had. The pieces of the Air India plane wreck still sit in a warehouse 21 years later, while the WTC ironworks were quickly packed up and sold to China for melting up, without permission for anybody to examine them, except a few trusted accomplices. There are photos showing people standing in the holes cut by the planes and the fire captain radioed down that the fire was no problem, a few minutes before they were all killed.

The whole thing stinks to high heavens and I hope to see the truth come out in my lifetime.

Ed Deak.

btc
Interesting, - I saw a film clip where they drove a half-ton truck back and forth over one - then picked it up - and started firing, no problem. It looked like hell but worked just dandy. I think there's a plant in the states now where they're making a 'hunting' rifle version probably from imported bits. And you can take one manufactured 30 years ago and tear it down side-by-side with a modern one and swap parts. The US gun is much more accurate and sophisticated I'll bet but in real world conditions you'd rather have an AK47 perhaps.

Pakistan supports the Taliban because that's what it is supposed to do. How can one keep a war going unless it's supported?

On the morning of September 11, Pakistan's Chief Spy General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged "money-man" behind the 9-11 hijackers, was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO206A.html

The article goes on to say how Mohammed Atta was financed through Pakistan to bank accounts in Florida.

And wasn't it convenient for those in charge now in Pakistan and Washington, to have that other sweetheart, General Zia and 30 of his military men all die in the same crash?

Looking away from the conspiracy theorists, more to the point should be the dropping polling numbers for the desire to keep military forces in Afghanistan.

A main point to keep in mind while pondering the 'stay or leave' question is the simple historical fact that Afghanistan is the place where 300,000 or more Soviet troops with armor, heavily armed and armored helicopters and the backing of the Kremlin did not 'win' anything in this part of the world.

Do we really think that we have the resources to keep up with the level of resistance yet to come?

More to the point of our 'nation', we did not see any debate when the troops were deployed, now it seems we will be continuing this bleeding of our already whitened military; without any debate at all...

Going into Afghanistan we needed to hire German mercenaries to 'guard' our positions to start with. Canadian troops were transported via US military aircraft.

We are incapable of escaping from the location without help, I expect a 100% loss unless we start to plan for what will be needed.

Nana

Michel Chossudovsky who wrote your linked article is highly credible... I`ve bookmarked it and will read it when I get back from V for Vendetta

I may have seen your video..has it been out awhile?
bob

Give me a break Murdoch...this is conspiracy evidence I'm talking about ...which you refuse to examine! The guys with boxcutters is the theory....one promulgated by proven liars. Can we get real here and drop the arrogant attitude.

Ask yourselves who were the beneficiaries of the last 5 years except the people in charge of the phony "War On Terror".

One of the benefits of being as old as I am, is that I've seen it before....twice! Pearl Harbor was allowed to happen and the Gulf of Tonkin NEVER happened.

Bring down some buildings that were in need of replacement ... which would have been a very expensive demolition job done properly, the owner gets double the insurance payout...because there were two planes... and then use it to suspend the Bill of Rights.

Should have been a winner, except all of us are not that dumb.

Unless you blow open 9/11, the cover story on Afghanistan, Canadians will continue to die.

Do us all a favor, cut the BS and examine the evedence...and I don't mean the shill called Hoffman.

G West

Actually I was not suggesting at all that the invasion of Afghanistan was justified for the reason you specified or any other. I honestly haven't decided what I think about it, which is why I asked a whole lot of questions.

I do know that particpation in an invasion or the aftermath is something entirely new for Canada, if for no other reason that we are small in numbers and a relatively new nation.

But no-one has since offered any comment on my questions regarding the legality or morality of our participation, which is disapointing, especially regarding the Geneva convention.

The 9/11 attacks did originate in Afghanistan, but did that justify an invasion ? I remain uncertain.

A more likely parellel is whether (prior to their election), terrorist attacks by Hamas would justify Israel invading the Palestinian territories and seizing control. Because if attacks from Hamas occur after they are in power, it clearly could be considered an act of war.

Tessa

With all due respect, as far as I know, Canada sent one peacekeeper, Romeo Dallaire. He was in command of the Belgians who got pulled out when the shit hit the fan.

Canada, USA, and basically the rest of the world did NOTHING when general Dallaire repeatedly called home to Canada and to the UN for a few measly regiments, which would have save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Bill Clinton later visited Rwanda and admitted that 100,000+ people could have been saved but for the lack of action.

I beleive that this was the one event in recent memory that foreign intervention was undeniably justified. Too bad it didn't happen.

nana
no haven`t seen this video..bookmarked..check it out when I get back

Thanks
btc

Even assuming Osama did it...the Taliban said they'd turn him over to the US...if they got evidence connecting him to the dirty dee. They got bombs instead. It was not an unreasonable request...and considering they had been wined and dined at the Crawford Ranch that summer...and given $40 million and had ex-CIA chief Richard Helms niece-by-marriage as their Washington go-between and they were in negotiations for a pipeline across the country...they thought they'd be treated properly. Dumb patsies!

So, does the war in Afghanistan have a legal leg to stand on?

It's a war crime, my dears....just like Iraq.

The buildings came down because they were expertly demolished by controlled explosives. Why this isn't obvious is a mystery. Anyone with any kind of serious smarts has already figured this out. Combustion needs heat, fuel and oxygen, eh--and exactly how did one airplane supply enough of these to bring down these huge buildings? The airplane could have done extreme damage alright, but only to a couple of floors.

Tessa wrote:

Les Perrault (Canadian Press) writes:

(Kandahar) The teenage convicts hold hands as they arrive at Kandahar prison by car, shackled in pairs at the ankles and wrists beneath their bulky red coveralls.

``The young ones are thieves and some are homosexuals, but mostly they are thieves,'' says a prison guard who refuses to give his name.

Most of the 620 prisoners behind the walls of Kandahar prison are the usual assortment of adult male thugs and bandits. But scattered among them are women and children accused of so-called crimes that human rights organizations denounce.

Four years after the end of the brutal excesses of the Taliban government, Afghan authorities supported by the U.S.-led coalition, including Canada, are still jailing teenagers convicted of homosexuality and women accused of adultery, eloping or running away from their husbands.

The prison has 11 women in one compound, where their dozen small children play. Three of the women prisoners have murdered their husbands, officials say. Most are in jail for offences not found in the Criminal Code of Canada or the US.

A couple are guilty of being ``Taliban women'' while the rest are in for ``sex problems'' and running away, according to Mohammed Aslam, the prison's head of security. He declines to offer much more of an explanation for the offences.

Human rights groups have their own interpretation.

``Dozens of women are imprisoned around the country for running away from abusive or forced marriages, or for transgressing social norms by eloping,'' says the 2006 report on Afghanistan by Human Rights Watch. ``Some are placed in custody to prevent violent retaliation from family members.''

Amnesty International's 2005 report notes the same phenomena. It adds: ``There remained widespread confusion among officials in the criminal justice system, including judges, as to the exact legal basis of the `crime' of `running away.' Such an offence does not exist in the Afghan Penal Code.''

Some prisoners are tidy, but most of the prison is not.

Outside the relatively clean cell blocks, sewage flows into a nearby stream while garbage, including old needles and other medical waste, is strewn about. Feces collect on a window sill near a toilet.

The main task of the PRT's civil-military co-operation unit is improving the professionalism and effectiveness of Kandahar's security forces.

Changing the law falls far outside their mandate.

``We are in a different culture,'' said Maj. Ron Locke, head of the unit team.

``Different laws and different treatment standards are normal here. All we can do is try to influence them with advice and training.''

Locke notes that United Nations officials make regular visits to the prison to try to ensure a basic level of human rights.

His team, he says, will try to build on a basic standard of living.

It's a good thing we're over there, proudly enforcing shari'ah law on behalf of the poor Afghanis.

I just love the statement:

Oh sure, sure. If our troops were asked to arrest Afghani Jews or the infant children of Christian missionaries, rather than just women and homosexuals, I imagine there would be a tad less enthusiasm for the job. Maybe then they would want to do more than offer the Afghanis a tut-tut here and a tsk-tsk there. But women? Homos? No big deal. After all, we're over there to help the poor Afghanis, except for the ones we're not there to help.
Other than that, we're there to enforce shari'ah law, which is the whole point, isn't it?

There is a lot of lying going on in and around Iraq these days. Supposedly Canada has nothing to do in that country but today Harper is telling us about how coalition forces stormed a building and got three folks released. Good for them. zsupposedly we are not part of a coalition in Iraq. But then it seems the RCMP was in the area and some Canadian special forces guys as well. SAS ran the operation and a American General did the talking. So Harper says they are there but will leave soon.
Our group in Afganistan started at 500 and is now over 2500. Does it get discussed in parliament. Forget it says our new leader Harper. He is so pleased that some leader in the UK or the US of a actually phones him, usually after what ever is happening has already been resolved.

It makes perfect sense to me....if the warlords want women and gays kept in their places...well that's what's needed to get the pipeline through.

We're there to support democracy by hypocracy....and lots of blood.

Conspiracy theories are, in my opinion, what rise to the surface when people get the feeling they've been lied to or there is a cover up of some kind.
Yep, there are plenty of lies to go around, but conspiracy theories just let an incompetent and greedy administration off the hook and give them too much credit for diabolical intelligence and a planning capacity they don't possess and are incapable of organizing, respectively.

It's certainly possible that elements of Pakistani intelligence could have worked with OBL and the Taliban - who'd be surprised about that? As for the rest of it, I'm sorry, but you haven't convinced me.

Bringing down the buildings with nothing but the heat of combustion is not impossible. The buildings were designed with no interior columns - floors rest on light-weight truss-joists spanning from the centre core to the exterior screen wall of hollow-section columns approximately 1 meter centre to centre.
The floors were lightweight poured concrete slabs on a lightweight truss joist system. The insulation, permitted by a special exception to the NY building code at the time of construction was sprayed on. The building itself was extremely flexible and would move laterally more than a meter at its top under strong wind pressure. The collision impacts, which likely knocked a significant amount of insulation off a section of trusses permitted the fire (whose heat was significantly enhanced by the large amounts of paper and other flammable material in the building) to begin to attack a significant number of trusses on more than one floor. Once the trusses (which are very small in section) became ductile and started to sag, they were subject to local failure. Successive local failures multiplied the dead loads on adjacent supports -one thing led to another and eventually, bingo. Not many of the intermediate failures were visible because of the screening characteristics of the exterior tubular columns and smoke so the collapse looked, therefore, as if it all happened practically instantaneously.
As for the box cutters: On that point I agree with you. I'm quite certain that, somehow or other, the hijackers had guns and/or other weapons of some kind.
If you're looking for a conspiracy I think the fact that the airlines have successfully hidden the facts about the guns and other weapons (which security should have caught) in order to avoid legal liability is a pretty good one. More than that, not so much.

good points on the building collapse G West ,one thing i noticed on the conspiracy sites is non of these genius' pointed out,THE DOMINO EFFECT.

even a child with building blocks knows that at a certain hight things tend to go wonky,everything has to be perfect,hit that stucture just a little and like dominos the blocks/structure tumbles.

placing demolition charges in strategic spots is time consuming and not being noticed is a real problem for both sabatuers and their work,someone would have noticed.

while i love a good conspiracy,this is one of those common sense things that has to be examined closely.we know that the security forces and politicians had gotten wind of this bull$hit long before,BUT DID NOTHING

just like DUBYA ,ignored the advice on katrina flooding,AND DID NOTHING.

pearl harbor,DID NOTHING.

sometimes,it's just human stupidity

Rebel: First off, how can you predict what the PM will do whenever parliament meets? Unless I am misinformed, we already made a committment in the last parliament, without debate, and he has only committed to keeping same. Are you clairvoyant?
With regard to your "imagined future campaign of fear", I would suggest that Canadians are a) too apathetic, b) too peaceful, c) too appeasement minded and c) too smart/common sensical to be stampeded as you would suggest. After all, we did kick out the liberanos despite all the fear mongering of how scary Harper's bunch would be.

70% are unaware of our combat role.
69% in favor of a debate.

support for this fiasco is entirely dependant on the ignorance factor... its not surprising Harper is scared sh*tless of a debate.

tks,
rjm

btw, not just Harper...

:)

tks,
rjm

G.West...where did you get your info on the building construction...NOVA, National Geographic, the BBC....all of them misrepresented the building design. According to 125 year old Fire Engineering Magazine, no steel highrise has EVER collapsed by fire before OR after the WTC.
See their call for a real investigation.
Ask yourself how the towers withstood the impact of the planes but succumbed to piddling office fires.
http://fe.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=OnlineArticles&SubSe%20ction=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=25&ARTICLE_ID=131225

H.Kann...What you call the domino effect, what is called the Pancake Theory, that weak trusses and fire hot enough to weaken steel do not hold up on close examination. There were over 100 stories in those builings...they came down almost in free fall...in less than 11 seconds. Pancaking would take far more time than that.
see:http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/trusstheory.html

This is really important. I beg you to examine the evidence. The criminals who carried out the 9/11 attacks are the same ones who are pushing the War OF Terror on all of us.

Depleted uranium dust has been found in Britain having drifted in from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lung cancer rates have gone up in the US by 600% in the last two years. Now they want to attack Iran. We have got to stop it and the only way is to let them know we no longer buy the story.

Please examine the evidence at st911.org

Try to look at:
http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/analysis/anomalies/html

Also at the uncensored photos at:
http://plaguepuppy.net/public_html/collapse%20update/

Not to mention the Pentagon "plane" flying without wings and leaving no debris.

Ed Deak.

Elliot: I hate to see a righty agreeing with the progressives but if memory serves correct, we stuck around Germany for some 40 years after WWII & Fwance for some 20 or so years. Granted, I don't think we were taking casualties in those locales but we nevertheless had to hang around what were supposedly civilized countries to ensure they didn't keep on killing each other.
Afghanistan is a much different locale without the same history of democratic instutions, rule of law etc such as existed in Europe prior to the insanity of the first half of the 20th century and won't get there overnight.
To expect this asymetrical/guerilla warfare of this generation which is much harder to deal with in a conventional military sense to not yield casualties is naive in the least. I would remind you that a) our soldiers are volunteers and b) we lost 907 souls in one attack in WWII, Dieppe.
While we don't have enough soldiers, those we do have are of the highest quality and have always been of top quality. They can look after themselves and I think that pressure from western leaders will, in the end, win the day for this fellow currently under a death sentence for converting to Christianity. I was very happy to see our PM take the lead over W in this regard.
Bottom line, in my opinion; our freedoms and way of life are worth fighting for, our soldiers understand this and embrace theiir mission and will succeed. Who nows, maybe it will be one of our snipers that finally puts a bullet between the eyes of that 6'5'' c*$%#^&*#&. That would be sweet!

Gosh, I had been away from this thread for a while and didn't realize we had veered off in to Charlie Sheen Moonbat Conspiracy thread. Wow, scary. Is Cindy joining us soon?
By the way Nana, if all these bad things are happening, how come people keep living longer? Just curious how that works, logically speaking.
You have a severe case of BDS.
The perpetrators of 9/11 were, just as with JFK's assasination, those identified.
In one sense, it is amazing the Americans prevailed over the USSR insofar as their capitalist system coupled with base human greed caused them to have few secrets. They couldn't even keep secret that had the technology and were actually listening in to AQ communications for goodness sake and they consider themselves at war.

Nana
The details were common knowledge at the time the building was constructed. The engineer who worked with Yamasaki was interviewed in either the Atlantic monthly or the New York Times Magazine after the collapse. The pancake explanation is perfectly reasonable.

There was another steel framed building adjacent to WTC that collapsed after burning for several hours on 9/11 – you probably saw it on TV.

I remember reading about the construction and its unique features in the 70s when I was going to architecture school. High level photographs taken from a plane before the building was occupied show it to be almost transparent. The structure was so ductile and flexible that it was retrofitted with dampers a few years after it was finished because tenants on the upper floors were getting sick from the motion during high winds. Paper burns at a very high temperature and small gauge, light duty joists are not very difficult to heat – especially if you knock off the sprayed insulation – which was, at the time the building was built, also a fairly new wrinkle.
The Port Authority wanted a building with minimal interior subdivisions; they asked for a design that could be built cheaply and very quickly - they got it. If both planes had hit the Empire State Building, it would still be standing.
No mystery, just a strange combination of bad luck and circumstances. Exceed design live and dead loads by a specific margin and you can get anything to collapse. If I’d been working in that building on 9/11 I would have gotten out as fast as my legs could carry me. If you doubt the intensity of the heat levels you’d need to have another reason why people were jumping without parachutes.

G. West, lies and coverups ARE conspiracies, and they usually happen to conceal the truth. People don't lie and coverup just to alleviate boredom. They lie and coverup because they have something to hide. As for your complicated building collapse, now HERE's an appropriate place to employ Occam's Razor, one corollary of which might be: if it looks like a duck it probably is a duck.

The buildings came down because they were brought down by controlled detonation. Fires burn out when they run out of fuel, eh. The domino theory is a cute idea but would not work in the absence of the requirements for combustion.

nana complains:

which would you like broken, since our parliament is broken, our civil liberties are next on the block. Perhaps something more personal; arm or leg?

I want an examination, in bright light, not partly framed conspiracy theories.

If we do not get the chance in the House of Commons to discuss our troops deployment, no other forums will make much difference.

I have seen so many different theories and postulations (I agree the pentalawn is really a strange place for aircraft dissapearances!), yet the sane and rational discussion of our involvement in Afghanistan has not occurred.

It should, now.

Later will not matter as we will have lost whatever goodwill we may have built over the past UN peacekeeping missions...

G, nobody's "doubting the intensity of the heat levels," as you say. We're just doubting that all the heat necessary to bring down the building was generated from the planes impacting the building.

Oh, yes haraldkann, I forgot. The buildings were "powered down" for thirty hours the weekend before 9/11. Plenty of time to install the estimated 10,000 pounds of explosives at strategic places.
G. West, examine the evidence...like an MIT Research/Engineer named Jeff King at www.st911.org.(see MIT Engineer Explains WTC Controlled Demolition) Almost everything you "know" has been soma spoon fed you to keep you in your trance state.

Why did they destroy the evidence by moving all of the steel...under armed guard yet...off site before a forensic examination? What was being hidden.

As for Afghanistan, why not Darfur. Millions of starving people--subject to the genocidal conspiracy of the Sudanese government and its surrogate killers-- huddled in unprotected encampments, could use our help at least as much as the people in Afghanistan.

P.S. Murdoch

There is no law requiring Parliamentary review of a Prime Minister's decision to send troops into any theater...at home or abroad. It would take years to get the neccessary legislation through...if ever. Nobody likes giving up absolute authority.

Just because the building seemed to collapse from the point of view of the TV cameras extremely quickly and suddenly doesn't mean that the temperatures necessary to create successive failures weren't taking place over a longer period of time. Think about what you're saying. Why would a conspirator bother with the planes, which were certainly hijacked and were certainly flown into the towers, if they were going to destroy them with controlled explosions? And, if you're using this diabolical plan to destroy these two identical buildings why would you detonate them at different times? Why would the characteristics of the two failures be displayed so differently if, in fact the cause was the same - a carefully controlled explosion?

But even more important, and here I think Occam's Razor does come into play, why not accept the most plausible available explanation rather than inventing one that requires far more collusion and intricacies than the nominal cause?
As to the business of shipping the steel off to China. Why not? There were forensic crews of dozens of people working for months sifting through the debris removed from the site recovering bits of human remains and other data. What more would you want?
A building stands, any building, because of the complex inter-relationship between its parts. Depending upon its design, if you sever a sufficient number of vital components (or weaken them) the rest of the building has enough mass to destroy itself - that's what happened, period.

i think poor old nana has dementia.

Truman Green
Hello buddy. Diesel fuel (that's essentially what powers turbo jets isn't it) doesn't burn with sufficient intensity to weaken the steel joists on its own. Combined with paper, wood, plastic, floor and wall coverings the temperatures - especially with the convection generated winds at that height and the cross-draft effect from the holes in the curtain wall - are more than adequate to cause failure in unprotected steel when the temperatures are sustained over a period of 45 minutes or more. Even areas protected by fire-rated gypsum are seldom rated for more than an hour - you're a carpenter, you know this. All the ceilings in the building were suspended, not solid – it was a disaster waiting to happen and that’s one reason why the fire codes were changed after the towers were built.
As for pulling out of Afghanistan and trying to do more for Darfur, if you've read my posts, you know I'm with you on that, man.
I'm just not, as you know from our earlier discussions, much of a conspiracy buff. I have enough to cope with in dealing with reality.
Cheers.

And why did WTC 7 collapse? There was no plane hitting it. Maybe it was just a sympathetic collapse,in keeping with the domino theory. It's amazing what some people will believe.

Buildings came down too fast. Not enough fire. In fact, the black smoke signals that the fires were burning out. Joist work, light or not supports its own weight and the weight of materials connected to it--called "live load"--not the weight of floors above. There was no sign that the vertical structural columns below the initial collisions were damaged or weakened.

And why again, did WTC7 collapse, planeless?

G West
Commercial jet fuel is usually Jet-A or Jet-B. One is almost pure kerosene and the other is a kerosene / gasoline mix.

G.West
We're not talking about mis-perception here. The buildings collapsed at near free-fall speed. Stop the obfuscation.

The "hijacked" planes were the cover so supposed terrorists could be blamed. Commercial pilots have stated that internal governors would not allow the manuvers executed by any of the planes...so there had to be remote control. The technology has been around ...and installed for years. In fact Lufthansa complained about the remote control over-ride installed on their Boeing bought jets some time in the 90's.

One does not destroy evidence at a crime scene before it has been examined unless one is covering up something...and what a wonderful coincidence that the steel from the building was in the exact lengths to fit the trucks belonging to the company that cleaned up the site...wonderfully called Controlled Demolition. What was the rush to ship it out of the country except to prevent close examination.?

Are you too afraid of what it means that 9/11 WAS an inside job to examine the evidence? Let us draw a veil over it all so G. West doesn't have to examine his/her world view and get upset.

The buildings were engineed to withstand the impact of 2 707s simultaneously..."as a hole poked in a screen would not cause the screen to self destruct."

Look, the information is all there. Do us all a favor and examine it before you bring up all those tired and specious arguments again.

why is anyone debating with these clowns? is this the subject of fatso moore's next movielie?

WTC7 collapses planeless=smoking gun, eh.

PS. G.West
The building were specifically engineered so the central core COULD NOT act as a chimney. It was the 70's...not 100 years ago.

Kerosene, most of which blew off, burns at far less than the weakening point of steel. The steel at the WTC was certified to 2200F for at least 15 hours. the first building (the last hit) came down after 56 minutes. Do your homework.

So anyways, you guys who don't believe in conspiracies might wanna do a bit of diligence on the pile of crap Bush, Richard Pearl, Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rice etc. used to convince the American people that Irag had WMD, was in cahoots with Al Queda and was an imminent danger to US security.

Now THAT'S a conspiracy!

Truman Green
I already told you. Look back to Nana's claim that no other steel-framed building(s) have ever collapsed because of fire. I mentioned it there as evidence that she's misinformed. That building collapsed after the long-term effects of fire. It took longer ‘cause it was of a different design. I'd forgotten what it was called, thanks for the reminder.
Disagree with your point about the light-gauge unprotected steel and failure so would lots of civil engineers and architects I know - sorry.
As to speed of collapse. Again, look back at what I wrote initially. What you see with your eyes doesn't always tell you everything - the exterior structural wall elements hid a lot. Survivors reported noises inside the building long before failure was evident on the outside.

Gerhardius
Thx for the information about the fuel. Either way, I think the liquid fuel on its own would have burned out too quickly to create the necessary temperatures for failure. But in combination with large quantities of other combustibles the necessary temps aren't difficult to generate.

Nana
I'm not upset at all. You are. Anyway, what you want to believe is up to you. It seems to have made you extremely uncomfortable. That’s too bad. But there’s not much I can do about it. Some people believe in flying saucers, I don’t. Most days I have a good deal of trouble, given the state of the world, believing there’s a God.
I have enough problems with the difficulties that need addressing without complicating things with what I'm pretty sure is the result of people's imagination.
I watched the video you posted and I didn't find it persuasive at all – but thanks anyway.
As I said earlier, George Bush and his cronies are bad enough as the incompetents they so obviously are. People are dying because they (the Bushies) have some very strange ideas about the way the world works – that’s enough of a nightmare for me. And with our own Prime Minister’s recent decision to take up the crusade with more enthusiasm than he shows when he bids his kids goodbye at the school gate, that’s enough of a conspiracy for me too.
I've tried to be patient, but that's all the time I have for this tonight.
Cheers.

Nana
THey withstood the impact of the planes very nicely, it was the flames that brought them down.
One other tiny fact, the plane impact design study assumed that the striking 707 would be in a horizontal plane. No studies were done at the time the building was built of the consequences of an attendant fire.

Who said anything about a chimney - not me. You should read more carefully.

Cheers.

I see you ignored my reference to WTC7 collapsing without a plane. Maybe just try googling "WTC7 collapses." I bet you can't rationalize why 7 collapsed. On second thought, maybe you can.

Truman
I didn't say plane because it wasn't hit by a plane. The interior burned for hours, unfought, mostly by the NYFD for obvious reasons, and it eventually collapsed, no mystery - that's the whole point - I think there was a large quantity of diesel fuel for an emergency generator owned by the Port Authority in that building - but I might be wrong.
I'm not ignoring you, just packing it in dude.
Wish you could be a little less critical about what I'm trying to do here. It's not very becoming.

G, you should email FEMA (weirdly put in charge of the investigation) about why 7 came down in 6.5 seconds, planeless, because they admit that they don't really understand it, eh.
I should be "less critical about what you're trying to do here?" You're trying to support official explanations, as usual. This is a place of criticism. That's what we're all doing.

My sarcasm might derive from the mystery that anyone could believe that the most protected building on the face of the earth, the Pentagon could really have been hit by a boeing 707, without the Air Force being told to stand down; with the plane mysteriously dissappearing inside the building.

911 was perpetrated by an unknown agency. I don't pretend to know who.(I have my suspicions) But the official versions are just silly--especially WTC7.

Oops, 757, not 707. Incidentally the Pentagon was hit by a missile not a plane as the official version claims.

Truman
Just finished watching The Daily Show and came over here to shut off the computer, refreshed and saw your comment, so here goes. I wasn't objecting to what you're saying, although I'm probably not going to be convinced, but I thought you were being, how can I put it nicely, not particularly .... oh why not… civil. You accused me of 'rationalizing', 'ignoring', 'lacking diligence', and you said you were 'amazed by what I'd believe' ... I call that being pretty critical of me and not really confronting what I was saying .

Now, lets look at the collapse of Building 7 to start with. Your whole case rests, as I see it, on the assumption that Larry Silverman's misspeech was a Freudian slip and not a slip of the tongue, and upon observations that suggest the collapse of the building was more consistent with it having been demolished rather than falling of its own accord. Is that right?
Let's say you are correct and the building was demolished on purpose. Would that have been a bad thing? Isn't it possible that, if it were destroyed in a controlled way, the decision to do that was a result of a concern to limit further damage to an area of Lower Manhattan which had already suffered egregiously that day. Many firefighters had been killed and, given the fact that at that point I'm still not sure anyone even knew where george bush even was, that there was real fear that things might continue to get a lot worse (in terms of further attacks) before they got better. Under such circumstances might it not have been the logical thing to destroy the building and be done with it? I don't know what the manpower resources of the city were right then but I'll bet they were pretty strained. So, even if it was brought down by a controlled blast, maybe the worst thing here was the decision not to say anything. Why would Silverman, and presumably the better part of the whole of the upper echelon of city hall, the FDNY and the police continue to lie about it to this day?

I'm not saying that happened, mind you, I'm just saying there are a lot of possible explanations without going to the extreme case of a vast and malign conspiracy. I think the building fell after burning for several hours and that’s that. Maybe the fact that not many buildings have been left with fires burning inside them for that long is a new wrinkle in the field of systems failure and when buildings fall down under such circumstances they look like building 7 did. You admit it’s a rate phenomenon, right? Maybe it needs further study – there are lots of possibilities, in my opinion, that don’t compel me to accept your postulations.

I don't think there's a prima facie case for the WTC 1 and 2 collapsing for anything other than the effects of fire as I’ve already said. You don't have to melt the chords or web members of light gauge steel joists for them to lose their strength in compression and tension. Temperatures and durations can be a lot less than you and Nana have observed for failure or bending to occur. The light and quite thin concrete floor mass, the top chord of the joist is embedded in the concrete floor and together they form a structural unit of the required strength. Dislocate or upset that structural mass and the joists are subject to tipping and twisting moments - add in the effects of fire and those long joists can start to sag. Each sagging joist affects its neighbour and so on.
Anyway, I won't call your beliefs silly, which you decided, just above, to say you thought mine were. Again, as in the case of our previous discussion, I can't accept what you're saying but I'll defend your right to say it. Anyway, I think the last thing you can say about me is that I lack diligence so, it's way past my bedtime.
Cheers for now my friend

should be 'rare' not rate phenomenon near the end of paragraph 4.

Silverstein's slip wasn't Freudian. "Pull it " means pull the leaver or press the button to bring a building down in a controlled demolition.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/cutter.html

How else could those buildings have fallen so neatly, totally pulverized, into their own footprints?
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7.html

Then there's the problem of molten metal weeks later. See Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?
by Steven E. Jones, Ph.D. at st911.org.

But then anyone who can swallow the "Magic Bullet-Lone Assasin" theory of the Kennedy assasination after all these years of evidence to the contrary deserves some kind of medal from Tinkerbell.

EXPERTS CLAIM OFFICIAL 9/11 STORY IS A HOAX

Scholars for 9/11 Truth call for verification and publication by an international consortium.

Duluth, MN (PRWEB) January 30, 2006 -- A group of distinguished experts and scholars, including Robert M. Bowman, James H. Fetzer, Wayne Madsen, John McMurtry, Morgan Reynolds, and Andreas von Buelow, have concluded that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11.

They have joined with others in common cause as members of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" (S9/11T), because they are convinced, based on their own research, that the administration has been deceiving the nation about critical events in New York and Washington, D.C.

These experts suggest these events may have been orchestrated by elements within the administration to manipulate Americans into supporting policies at home and abroad they would never have condoned absent "another Pearl Harbor."

They believe that this White House is incapable of investigating itself and hope the possibility that Congress might hold an unaccountable administration accountable is not merely naive or wishful thinking.

They are encouraging news services around the world to secure scientific advice by taking advantage of university resources to verify or to falsify their discoveries. Extraordinary situations, they believe, require extraordinary measures.

If this were done, they contend, one of the great hoaxes of history would stand naked before the eyes of the world and its perpetrators would be clearly exposed, which may be the only hope for saving this nation from ever greater abuse.

They hope this might include The New York Times, which, in their opinion, has repeatedly failed to exercise the leadership expected from our nation's newspaper of record by a series of inexplicable lapses. It has failed to vigorously investigate tainted elections, lies leading to the war in Iraq, or illegal NSA spying on the American people, major unconstitutional events. In their view, The Times might compensate for its loss of stature by helping to reveal the truth about one of the great turning-point events of modern history.
cont'd

Dunno if any of you read the Toronto Star. On the website this morning I found this little gem, it's a copy of an email between two Star columnists.
Anyone's opinion of the Star and its writers notwithstanding, I think it is interesting that the folks who are leading the 'scumbag' hunt our military is engaged in in Afghanistan are so concerned about what material is available to our soldiers on the internet. Pretty 'open and accountable', eh?

Stunning as it may be to acknowledge, they observe, the government has brought but one indictment against anyone and, to the best of their knowledge, has not even reprimanded anyone for incompetence or dereliction of duty. The official conspiracy theory--that nineteen Arab hijackers under control of one man in the wilds of Afghanistan brought this about--is unsupportable by the evidential data, which they have studied. They even believe there are good reasons for suspecting that video tapes officially attributed to Osama bin Laden are not genuine.

They have found the government's own investigation to be severely flawed. The 9/11 Commission, designated to investigate the attack, was directed by Philip Zelikow, part of the Bush transition team in the NSA sector and the co-author of a book with Condoleezza Rice. A Bush supporter and director of national security affairs, he could hardly be expected to conduct an objective and impartial investigation.

They have discovered that The 9/11 Commission Report is replete with omissions, distortions, and factual errors, which David Ray Griffin has documented in his book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. The official report, for example, entirely ignores the collapse of WTC7, a 47-story building, which was hit by no airplanes, was only damaged by a few small fires, and fell seven hours after the attack.

Here are some of the kinds of considerations that these experts and scholars find profoundly troubling:

# In the history of structural engineering, steel-frame high-rise buildings have never been brought down due to fires either before or since 9/11, so how can fires have brought down three in one day? How is this possible?

# The BBC has reported that at least five of the nineteen alleged "hijackers" have turned up alive and well living in Saudi Arabia, yet according to the FBI, they were among those killed in the attacks. How is this possible?

# Frank DeMartini, a project manager for the WTC, said the buildings were designed with load redistribution capabilities to withstand the impact of airliners, whose effects would be like "puncturing mosquito netting with a pencil." Yet they completely collapsed. How is this possible?

# Since the melting point of steel is about 2,700°F, the temperature of jet fuel fires does not exceed 1,800°F under optimal conditions, and UL certified the steel used to 2,000°F for six hours, the buildings cannot have collapsed due to heat from the fires. How is this possible?

# Flight 77, which allegedly hit the building, left the radar screen in the vicinity of the Ohio/Kentucky border, only to "reappear" in very close proximity to the Pentagon shortly before impact. How is this possible?

# Foreign "terrorists" who were clever enough to coordinate hijacking four commercial airliners seemingly did not know that the least damage to the Pentagon would be done by hitting its west wing. How is this possible?

# Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, in an underground bunker at the White House, watched Vice President Cheney castigate a young officer for asking, as the plane drew closer and closer to the Pentagon, "Do the orders still stand?" The order cannot have been to shoot it down, but must have been the opposite. How is this possible?

# A former Inspector General for the Air Force has observed that Flight 93, which allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania, should have left debris scattered over an area less than the size of a city block; but it is scattered over an area of about eight square miles. How is this possible?

# A tape recording of interviews with air traffic controllers on duty on 9/11 was deliberately crushed, cut into very small pieces, and distributed in assorted places to insure its total destruction. How is this possible?

# The Pentagon conducted a training exercise called "MASCAL" simulating the crash of a Boeing 757 into the building on 24 October 2000, and yet Condoleezza Rice, among others, has repeatedly asserted that "no one ever imagined" a domestic airplane could be used as a weapon. How is this possible?

Their own physics research has established that only controlled demolitions are consistent with the near-gravity speed of fall and virtually symmetrical collapse of all three of the WTC buildings. While turning concrete into very fine dust, they fell straight-down into their own footprints.

These experts and scholars have found themselves obliged to conclude that the 9/11 atrocity represents an instance of the approach--which has been identified by Karl Rove, the President's closest adviser--of "creating our own reality."

WHere the heck is understandme when you need him?

I noticed the current West Ender features an article purportedly about war profiteering among Vancouver firms, but it's really a re-hash of all the standard arguments against the war. It presents public opinion poll data very similar to the numbers in this article showing increasing disapproval of the war. The problem is that the West Ender article uses these numbers to bolster an argument that is based fundamentally on morality.

The historical precedents are clear. It might be immoral, but it's not illegal to do business with allies who are at war. It would only become illegal if these companies contracted with a country we were at war with. Again, my only problem is that one can't deploy poll numbers as part of a morality play. Canadian firms with innocuous contracts with the U.S. military to provide such services as Stryker tire-repair simulators to train technicians are not doing anything wrong. You might well think the U.S. is the "Great Satan" and you might even be right - but these firms have an amoral (i.e. free of moral compunction) right to conduct their business until they contravene the law of the land.

This thread has certainly taken a turn for the interesting. Great posts and debate for the most part.

Steve P, I see you too have run into the increadible lies, distortions and general cheap shots The Brain continues under his new mask of Haraldkann.

Makes it interesting when someone spouts off and then when asked to explain or elaborate with a fact or two the best you get back are cheap insults.

But then as Haraldkann, he claims to have lots of military experience so I'm sure he would never toss a whopper out for general consumption, would he?

Nana
So let me get this straight, George Bush reacted like a deer caught in the headlights in that school in Texas not because he was shocked by the news that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had been hit by planes. What really shocked him was that the news he expected to hear was that the White House had been struck by an airliner but that wasn't the news he got. In fact, the plane that was intended for that purpose was flown by the man from the Grassy Knoll in Dallas and somehow he got sidetracked and went down in the Bermuda Triangle. Jeez, the things you learn on this thread!!

My comment in the thread on Iraq immediately behind this one works just about as well here, I think. No need to chew one's cabbage twice. :-)

nana got one of those audio books for christmas.

Alcibiades....I never said any of that.

But it really was interesting that Georgie II sat there for 20 minutes reading an upside-down book after the SECOND tower was hit. He was a "sitting duck", especially since his itinerary had been known for two weeks.....so why didn't the Secret Service get him out of there and why did they put the school at risk if the US was under attack from outside forces?

I'd advise reading James Fetzer's "THINKING ABOUT "CONSPIRACY THEORIES": 9/11 and JFK"

"The phrase "conspiracy theory" harbors an ambiguity, since conspiracies are widespread and theories about them need not be mere speculations. The application of scientific reasoning in the form of inference to the best explanation, applied to the relevant evidence, establishes that the official account of the events of 9/11 cannot be sustained. Likelihood measures of evidential support establish that the WTC was brought down through the use of controlled demolition and that the Pentagon was not hit by a Boeing 757. Since these hypotheses have high likelihoods and the only alternatives have likelihoods that range from zero to null (because they are not even physically possible), assuming that sufficient evidence has become available and "settled down", these conclusions not only provide better explanations for the data but are proven beyond reasonable doubt."
st911.org/

Yeah, sometimes I'm at a loss to explain how hard-core conspiracy theorists come up with their notions. Some of them have a bewildering array of facts & references at their disposal. I'm reminded of when we got into the whole AIDS-as-hoax debate a couple months ago...I knew the argument was nonsense, but I simply didn't have a grasp of the medical arcana to actually challenge the conspiracy theory on its own terms. [no personal offense, Nana, as you've obviously made an effort to articulate your ideas in a clear & rational fasion...I just can't imagine anyone in government being that smart & together to engineer something as nefarious as this].

Irony is "truly" dead.

allan ! you finally found your true peers on this thread.

given time,you should be able to figure out exactly who the man on the grassy knoll was,cause you'll just find out what civil service union he was in and bingo.

then you can get all your rabid union buddies together and investigate how bush heard the news with his head up his butt.

then you and your deductive senses can figure out,with that honking brown probiscus of yours,what really stinks in the great land of the united mistakes.

now,look under your bed allan,but be warned,big business is under there with the dust bunnies and allan...they are out to get you .

nana opines:

not a review of PM's decision?

that is what the polls are for.

Declaration of War does require such a debate, so since none has happened I guess we are not 'officially' part of the WAR on terror eh?

Murdock, m'lad
I'm going to have to be careful. Much more of this stuff and you and I going to find ourselves agreeing about something.
Tip o' the hat!

Probiscus wasn't in my Webster's Collegiate...I had to do a google image search :-]

Probiscus!
http://accad.osu.edu/~midori/03_751/assignments/A2/abeedy/Probiscus.jpg

Two Probiscii!
http://emmes.net/malaysia/regions/sabah/pics/kinapatangan_river_probiscus_monkey2.jpg

Haraldkann doesn't write anything like The Brain. I'm confused. Do people actually created alter-egos for themselves on these things? Do you think we're all one person?

From Truman Green:

Sure I can. Like the other two the 'owner' did not want them anymore, so he 'pulled' them all.

nightbloom
You're a clever guy - but you should read your Vonnegut a little more closely.

Oh, ye Keepers of the False Consensus....83% agree with Charlie Sheen that there is a government cover-up on 9/11 on the CNN poll.

The tide is turning...and like King Canute, ain't nothin' you can do about it.

ooooohhh... charlie sheen!
poor nana. we're trying to find a real nice 'home' for her.

G West,why read vonnegut ,when you can read these threads.

there is so much paranoia here it's unbelievable and now the conspiracy theorists...i have to tell you.my eyes are having a hard time telling my brain,that ,yes these people are really .....out there.

and if anybody wants to call me,understandme,we can add that to the list too,cause i know there are many here who look under their beds before turning off that light.

but i'm smarter than all of you,i gotta night light...they aint gettin me.

i'm a man(or should i say many men)on a mission.

Boy - there are a bunch of idiots on this thread - what a waste of minds!

welcome to the monkey house

...and so it goes.

So do we know who killed irony yet? I've been waiting.

nightbloom,

when neocon posts things like

it makes me believe that irony is alive and well!

http://www.erichufschmid.net/senDayton.htm

video US Senator Mark Dayton accuses the 9/11 Commission

elliot, it appears, and neocon too have finally found a home.

I’ve often wondered where did all those border line psychotic patents go that may have slipped through the cracks upon the closing of the Esondale Psychiatric and Mental institution , after reading over the previous postings, I have come to the conclusion that , many of them are right here, on this site. The difference being now though, they are no longer border line psychotic, they are psychotic.

No. Spring is in the air is all....

Wow, this thread sure veered off topic and into Charlie Sheen Stark Raving Moonbat territory. Again, the knee jerk, anti american, GW hating themes are disconcerting and belies my long held theory that Canadians are above average (vs the rest of the world) in intelligence and this is what has allowed us to prosper as a nation despite decades of liberano rule.
GW: While I do not agree with you vis a vis Iraq, I am always interested in your posts as they are well reasoned and intelligent and you are obviously a gentleman.
Best to all for the weekend, moonbats included.

oilbertan says

Thats putting it mildly, this thread is off the rails.

Woody, you have described the new look Brain to a T. But be careful, as Haraldkann The Brain's new persona is to act the tough guy.

If he starts to get weird on you simply ask him a question and watch the fireworks.

oilbertan
hat tip to you too - was hoping you'd pop up so I could upbraid you about the latest poop from Alberta - what's this business about bouncing cabinet ministers (who happen to be pretenders to Ralph's throne) for opening their mouths?

Will you guys never learn?

Cheers.

Hey everybody, I just thought of a plan to get over people displaying various personna etc.

Why don't you guys just use your real names, eh. Little bad kids throw rocks then run and hide in their mothers' kitchens. But we're all playing grown-up here.

All this anonymity is a bit disgusting, don't you think!

If we use our real names we're being openly responsible for everything we write, whether it's profound, conspiracist, looney or brilliant.

So grow up you effing cowards, eh.

yes using our own names gives ownership to our statements.

unfortunately,people start looking under their beds for the bogeyman when they think they hear something scary.

like allan hearing me question union heads for their short sightedness,then bashing him for his stupidity.

hey allan ,last union i worked for was a rat union,it was a teamsters union local 213 ,now why don't you show people how smart you said you would be if you got this information.

and ,like i said,i am in the phone book,i am also eager to have you shoot your mouth off to my face,as you said you would.

we are waiting to be enlightened now ,BLOWHARD.

and as you can see on the other thread...the BRAIN is back...ha...ha...ha...

Truman, I think I'll stick to my handle. At my age the threat of broken bones does not appeal, no matter how much in jest Murdoch may have meant it.

Anyway, I begin to feel that the reason nobody discusses the articles I've posted and instead make snide comments about my age is that they are probably in somebody's pay to keep a lid on things.

Here's an interesting article by Morgan Reynolds who served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University.
http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=we_have_holes

Obviously the MSM is doing its job, and even usually reasonably intelligent people like G West buy into the biggest conspiracy theory of all, that 9/11 happened the way that is called the official story.

Reread what you said here G West:

If you have read it again, now pay attention, how could Silverman issue the order to "pull" WTC 7 UNLESS it was already rigged for demolition? Do you think they were standing around watching the chaos and just decided on the spur of the moment to bring down another building. By the way, the basement levels were closed off immediately prior to 9/11 for some kind of maintenance (loading charges perhaps?) and amazingly enough Neil "the ripper offer of S and L's" Bush was involved with the company in charge of security at the World Trade Center during that period of time.

I'll admit, I too thought it tin foil headgear stuff to even think that the Bush Crime Family was involved/complicit in 9/11. But over time I've come to realize they had to be.

No intercepters challenging airliners wandering all over the NorthEast US - never happened before 9/11 - any stray airliner is usually bracketed by jet fighters ready to shoot it down unless it can explain - in minutes.

Rumsfeld missing in action all morning until after the missle hit the Pentagon - this guy IS the Secretary of Defense, even if he is a lousy one.

The secret service not getting Bush out of the school in Florida

Finding Atta's wallet and ID intact on the rubble right away - right, they couldn't even identify bodies and building parts were dust but the wallet of a guy theoretically on a plane that just crashed into a building miraculously winds up intact on top of the rubble.

I could go on, but really you should open your eyes and read the writings of David Ray Griffin and Steve Jones the professor from Utah (not a hotbed of left wing whackos) to mention just a couple and ask some questions. Like why did all the surveillance tapes that would have shown the plane that hit the pentagon get scooped by feds within minutes of impact, never to be seen by any one but the cabal one must assume?

Why was Bush so opposed to any inquiry into 9/11 and then when pretty well forced to pretend to have one why spend only one quarter as much investigating such a tragic event that cost almost 3000 American lives as they were willing to spend investigating what Bill Clinton's dick was doing?

Why did Bush and Cheney have to testify TOGETHER and not under oath? This one really gets me, it's not like they have any problem lying.

At least Nana and Ed Deak can smell the coffee.

These guys (the Bush Crime Family) will stop at nothing, they lie, they steal elections, they are willing to kill anyone that Dubya declares an enemy or terra guy, Dubya's grand daddy did bizness with the Nazis right through World War II and the government finally slapped his wrist and closed one of his banks, and I'm afraid that they will orchestrate another "Pearl Harbor type event" to counter act the Chimporer's sinking poll numbers and get the retards in the states and PeeWee Plump guy behing another attack on a soveriegn country, this time Iran and probably with Nukes.

Interesting observation.

Assuming the planes have a manual override by the pilots inside, a good old fashioned terrorist hijacking could still work.

The same old W5 keep popping up, as to get the right answers, one must ask the right questions. Who was behind it again? Which CIA paid terrorist group this time? And why? Doubts surrounding how the hijacking took place are dwarfed by the motives behind it. Most have seen Micheal Moore's 911 doc. Bush popularity was at a low. The markets were listless. The election looked like it was stolen. The times around 911 saved Bush's ass and possible presidency, giving him the patriotic diversion he needed, and the motive to go to war and invade IRAQ.

We've always known or should have known who. The elite rich corporation of major corp shareholders, banks and CEO's from the U.S. empire, particularly large cap oil corps world wide.

We know or should know why: To privatize nationalized assets in Iraq, Iran or any other nation with nationalized commodities, to buy them as they've bought Canada. To privatize and promote globalization by the usual major corp shareholders to expand markets and market share to make more money. To install a government that allows corporate structured world market access into oil resources in the middle east, or any other commodity or resource anywhere else, or meet with resistance from the U.S. corporate empire for the same old cause of all wars. Money and power.

Knowing the who, and the where as in the middle east, and the why, to own foreign commodities for money, the what is what levels of war it will take, along with timelines, the question of when it will all take place, and how it will all go down, if left uncontested here at home.

So, with home in mind, our concerns with the lack of talk in the commons over Canadian military missions proponed by Conservatives, and the lack of knowledge Angus Reid suggests with Canadians average awareness to our military role as combative rather than peace keeping, suggest that Canadian media has failed to report the news and facts to the average Canadian concerning our military status in the middle east.

Coupling this failure to report our military status in Afganistan with a U.S. media that is clearly controlled by international foreign policy and right wing governments, suggest that the average Canadian is out of touch with current events.

This article suggests that times have changed leaving us behind and with them, so do the polls, not in our favor, suggesting to us that we don't even know the current "what" that our present military status in Afganistan actually is, much less who's behind it or why, and that is most worrisome of all. We're losing the early battles fought through the media's propaganda, whether its completely deleting the truth from print, to being too slow on countering or rebuffing the smears and lies that take its place.

rkewen
You have to read everything I wrote and not just pull out a quote you think supports your claims. People do all kinds of strange things when they're under stress. The words you're referring to came from a film, they weren't recorded on site. A lot of strange things happened that day, in retrospect it isn't surprising that it should affect a lot of people's equilibriums and views of themselves and the world.

All I meant was that, even if the building had been demolished, it wouldn't mean your whole vast theory had any credence. I thought that was pretty obvious from what I said and I'm only posting this so no one goes away with the mistaken impression that I think there is anything to your allegations and suspicions.
But, as I said last night to Truman Green, go for it, this is a free country and I really do believe in free speech.
Cheers.

G West, I just pulled out that one quote from your post to point out what was said, and the fact is you cannot demolish buildings on the spur of the moment - so obviously if they were demolished they had to be rigged in advance, can't you understand that simple fact?

I would not say that the Northern Alliance “rode in on the coattails” of the attack on the Taliban, they were an important part and provided most of the combat troops, previously they had been caught in a stalemate with the Taliban and it seemed neither side was able to completely defeat the others. The Taliban drew most of their strength from the south.

It has been clear that the Taliban grew out of support from Pakistan, mainly the Intelligence community there. (many various factions in the government) The theory was that Pakistan wanted to secure it’s Western flank with a friendly government so it could concentrate on it’s fight with India over Kashmir.

The AK is a very good firearm for what it is designed for, but it suffers from poor accuracy and the quality depends on who made it, some of the versions are complete junk. The M16 was designed by Stoner, the US Army bought the design, but used old gunpowder (had large stockpiles) which fouled the weapon, combined with tighter tolerance and the failure to properly issue cleaning kits lead to the poor reputation it had.

As for the 9-11 conspiracies, well have you ever seen how much work goes into preparing a building for demolition? I have also been to the site of a Hercules crash, it is amazing how little survived, most large aircraft are like egg shells. Excellent points G-west, however the box cutter can be very nasty in the hands of someone who is trained and one must remember at that time the policy was to play along with hijackers and get into negotiation, so no one was prepared for the event (although they had been warned of the possibility) My god, Harldkann and I are almost in agreement on something, wonders never cease!

Gwest, by the way an aircraft did strike the Empire State building, a B-25 if I recall correctly.

Nana, do you have any idea how DU ammunition works, the first mistake people make is they assume that the weight of the ammunition shipped to the front is all DU, the DU component works out to somewhere in the 10% range of the packed round.

Also the DU is made in the form of a non-explosive dart, it only loses a portion of it’s mass going through armour. If the rounds are from the gun on the A10, only every 6th round is a DU round if they are attacking armour, if not they don’t generally use it.

Most of the “dust” will be contained within the target vehicle that was hit and they are supposed to be carted off and treated as contaminated waste.

Truman
The African Union and Sudan have not allowed the UN or other groups to interfere, only in the last week has the AU agreed to UN support, they wanted this to be an “African solution”.

I surprised no one has come up with a conspiracy theory to explain the collapse of the 2nd narrows bridge?

All my firefighting has been on boats or in areas with no buildings. Fire is amazing thing and you will be surprised what it can do to metal. I went aboard a fish packer where the hydraulic system had created a fireball, everything from the waist up was turned to cinders and everything below was untouched, even the circuit breakers enclosed in the panel with the door shut had turned into one big blob. This fire ball had lasted all of about 6 seconds before it snuffed itself out. A residential fire will quickly reach 2,000°, add in a large amount of Jet fuel (I am pretty sure it’s Jet-A) which is kerosene based., lots of paper, plastics and supporting electrical fires, it won’t take long to stoke the fire to a high heat.

Highrises and tall building can be very fragile things and given half a chance gravity will take them down, once the girders on the fire floors let go, the entire weight above will start moving down, it then builds momentum and acts like a giant hammer crushing everything in it’s path.

And if they were rigged (charges loaded appropriately) in advance then the whole "surprise" terra event view of 9/11 kinda falls apart. Or did a bunch of goat herders with box cutters following orders from a guy in a cave in Afghanistan just happen to fly planes into the towers the same day they were scheduled for demolition? I must admit it is most unsual to demolish buildings while people are at work in offices in them and/or firemen are trying to evacuate them. 2/3 to 3/4 or New Yorkers aren't buying the official story anymore either, so wake up and look at the evidence.

The sinking of the Queen of the North and any small plane on the BC coast will be investigated more thoroughly than 9/11 was.

By the way G West, I'm sure the Bush Crime Cabal is glad most people are as trusting as you seem to be. I never thought you were giving my suspicions or allegations any credence, that would take some intelligence and some effort examining the evidence and the way the investigation (or lack of investigation) has been handled.

Because of people like yourself (who seem to be in at least a plurality) the Bush/Cheney cabal is well on their way to their dream of world domination and a return to the Dark Ages at best or the extinction of human life on this planet at worst, at least from our point of view as humans. Perhaps the planet and the other life forms on it it would regard our extinction as a good thing.

rkewen, absolutely. For some weird, surreal reason G. West is willing to accept the possibility that wtc7 might have been brought down by a controlled explosion, although he doesn't believe it. What is so insipid about his reasoning is that if wtc7 came down by design, then that's a pretty smoking gun about the other buildings because as you say, it wouldn't have been possible to just go rig wtc7 with strategically placed explosives in a matter of a few hours. This would have taken a lot of planning!

But G's reasoning is even weirder than that. He claims that bringing down wtc7 might have been the wise thing to do under the circumstances. I'm not picking on you G, but can you see the lengths you are willing to go not to relinquish your cherished view of the world--just as Nana has commented.

Did you see the videos of 7 coming down? It basically came down in a few seconds exactly as the other buildings--planeless. There really is a certain deficit in your polemic presentation G.

Colin your seeming expertise does not quite mesh with
http://www.citizen-soldier.org/CS09-uranium.html

"The American and British militaries first used DU weapons during Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf in 1991. Army and Marine M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks (shown on cover) fired 120mm rounds that each contained 10.5 pounds of depleted uranium. The M1 and M60 model tanks fired a 105 mm round with 8.5 pounds of DU in each shell. The Pentagon later estimated that 14,000 such rounds were expended during the war; 7,000 were fired in Saudi Arabia during target practice, 4,000 were used against Iraqi forces, and another 3,000 were consumed by fires or other accidents.

Another 940,000 30mm DU rounds were fired by A-10 "Warthog" jets in support of their "tank killing" operations during the brief war. All told, the Pentagon has estimated that 320 tons of depleted uranium was fired by US and UK units. As of today, not an ounce of this toxic residue has been removed by either the US or any other agency.

Months before the Gulf War, the Army's Armament, Munitions, and Chemical Command published the following warning: "Following combat, the condition of the battlefield and the long term health risks to natives [sic] and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU for military applications." The report added that DU has been "linked to cancer when exposures are internal."

"Another 940,000 30mm DU rounds were fired by A-10 "Warthog" jets in support of their "tank killing" operations during the brief war. All told, the Pentagon has estimated that 320 tons of depleted uranium was fired by US and UK units. As of today, not an ounce of this toxic residue has been removed by either the US or any other agency."

Because it's impossible to remove. The Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq are all contaminated. When the target is struck, the DU turns into 5 micron dust...it's aerosolized.

The kicker is that tungsten would do the same job of armour penetration....but then that costs more and the Pentagon gets it's DU at little or no cost from the Department of Energy.

Go back over my posts on why fire couldn't and didn't take down WTC1,2 or 7.

nightbloom, did you actually say you can't imagine a government doing something as "nefarious" as this. Uh...well they DID engineer a war on false pretenses (wmd, Iraq in cahoots with Osama, imminent danger to security of the US) and have killed maybe 100,000 Iraqis and 2300 of their own troops when now just about everybody agrees that the Clinton containment of Saddam would have been the best way to go.

As for "Aids being a hoax" as you say--nobody said Aids is a hoax, only that its real cause has not yet been found, and that HIV a harmless passenger virus isn't the cause of Aids, and that the chemotherapy recommended for anyone who tests positive for HIV is treating illness in the absence of symptoms, because the Elisa, Western Blot and p24 tests are entirely non specific. How many people do you think were killed by AZT, not to mention the other protease inhibitors, nucleoside inhibitors and othe highly-activated anti-retroviral therapies?

Guys, step back for a minute and read some of my other posts on this and other subjects: I'm the last person who'd be an apologist for George W Bush, as Colin I’m sure will tell you.

As I've said several times and if you'll take the time to actually read what I've written, I don't think you've made the case. I looked at the evidence you presented and I processed it against the knowledge and experience I already have. Moreover, I think, in this matter, I do know something about what I'm speaking so I'm not prepared to read any more of what you've got to say. I've tried to be both generous and fair in my criticism and my comments and I'm going to leave it at that. I don't appreciate some of the things you've written just above because I don't think it is either fair or reflective of what I've said or the tone I’ve adopted. I spent a good deal of time responding to your theories in a civil and respectful way – perhaps that was a mistake.

Nevertheless, truth to tell, whether or not you think I'm a fool is a matter of complete indifference to me. I have enough confidence in what I believe not to be troubled by your concerns for my supposed naïveté.

Others may not be as generous about the way this particular thread has been dominated by discussions that are a long way from the journalism that forms its anchor. I won't be spending any more time here unless the thread returns to a discussion of a subject more in keeping with its original intent.

Enjoy yourselves.

is this conspiracy shite still being discussed on this thread? talk about ridiculous behaviour. grow up and get a life people. nana; go back to your asylum.

i remember back in the sixties when that whacko that sang for jefferson airplane wanted to spike the water supply with LSD.

why,did i bring that up ? i just finished reading this thread...

thomas49, I didn't understand your post. Can you be a bit more specific?

Elliot, Nana has supplied a huge amount of information on tyee, and whether you believe anything she has to say, I for one, recognize her knowledge and diligence. As for suggesting she return to her asylum, that's not a hugely lucid comment.

Some governments do hoaxes and conspiracies. When the Americans starting doing B52 runs into Cambodia the Pol Pot henchmen starting running around telling the people to abandon the cities to save themselves. What they really wanted was to get them into prison camps so they could slaughter them by the millions.

This was a hoax. Nasty governments do hoaxes.

And the Vietnam War was basically a hoax perpetrated by the Johnson and Nixon administrations. That war killed 58,000 American soldiers and 1 to 2 million Vietnamese. History is largely a recounting of hoaxes. Slavery was a hoax. God giving present-day Israel to Jewish people in spite of the fact that Palestinians lived there is a hoax.

Canadian troops in Afghanistan to help the Afghans is a hoax. Our troops are there according to realpolitik, eh, more about appeaseing the Yanks than getting women out of Burkas.

Interesting point Truman Green, yet the 'hoax' here is the Orwellian 'NEWSPEAK' version of what is 'PEACEKEEPING'. The hoax masters are the Canadian Parliament and the mandarins located therin. The hoaxees are thee and me.

Watch for the definition of PEACEKEEPING to become more mushy all the time. In fact its fluidity will have a direct corellation to the level of negative reaction to the new "peacekeeping" missions that are embarked upon.

I can't read all this, I just kept breaking up, but has anyone brought up Rosewall and aliens and black helicopters and so on? Bring on the tinfoil beanie crowd! 'They' are beaming microwaves into our heads... help!!!!

hahahahaha...

but lets get back to Canada in Afghanistan. The Soviet empire tried... and failed. The British empire tried... and failed. and on and on and on... there are places in this world...Lebanon, the Caucauses, Afghanistan and the Ozarks, where feuds have a life of their own, and life is held cheap by all.

and for those of us who read, a little Kipling:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
an' go to your gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier _of_ the Queen

You know, Harper isn't too old to go...

R. Smiley

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=10613The

See above NYTime article from 1975

1975 WTC Fire: Over three hours, no structural damage and no collapse
by Nila Sagadevan

Information about a raging fire in the WTC North Tower on February 13, 1975 has just been brought to the attention of SPINE (Scientific Panel Investigating Nine-Eleven). The fire, which reportedly burned at temperatures in excess of 700°C for over three hours and spread over some 65 percent of the 11th floor, including the core, caused no serious structural damage to the steel structure. In particular, no trusses needed to be replaced.

In the wake of 9/11, it seems this important information could have been carefully concealed from the public. It¹s easy to see why‹it blows a huge hole in the farcical official 'pancake theory'...

No it would not. Tungsten penetrators are less ductile than DU and tend to mushroom, squash or fracture longitudinally when striking some armour. This can be adjusted by modifying the alloy composition but requires a range of tungsten penetrators for countering different types of armour. DU is more ductile than tungsten and DU penetrators ablate and bend rather than mushroom and fracture. The relative properties give DU a longer effective range than tungsten against a given armour thickness.

The folks who favoured DU over tungsten were anticipating massive battles between overwhelming Warsaw Pact forces and NATO and wanted the striking power to be effective from as long a range as possible. DU was chosen, and once the Pentagon has decided on anything that is pretty much it for a while.

Are you seriously comparing a relatively simple fire to the events of September 11th? In 2005 a steel tower in Madrid suffered a partial collapse, a "pancaking," that was stopped after reaching a concrete slabbed technical floor. The building was not even struck by an aircraft or anything! The core of the building, undamaged by aircraft contact, remained standing and a total collapse was prevented. There is some info here: http://www.mace.manchester.ac.uk/project/research/structures/strucfire/CaseStudy/HistoricFires/BuildingFires/default.htm

Ooops, I was doing the post in an editor and messed up the formatting. Sorry all.

See the new York Times article. I was comparing the wtc 1975 fire which lasted three hours and which destroyed most of the 11th floor. By the pancakeing logic, it should have happened in '75 since there were 100+ stories above it pressing down on steel columns which had to be hotter than any temperature reached in 2001.

So tungsten isn't quite as good as DU, but then tungsten doesn't cause gross birth deformities or cance or all the other lovely gifts that DU keeps giving....

What military has ever cleaned up any mess it made anywhere?

Gerhardius

did you see this material? from the same source:
http://www.mace.manchester.ac.uk/project/research/structures/strucfire/CaseStudy/HistoricFires/BuildingFires/worldTradeCenter.htm

Pretty much debunks the whole story. Perhaps they'll believe this since they wouldn't pay any attention to G West when he tried to tell them the same thing yesterday.

Somebody Blew Up America

by AMIRI BARAKA

Somebody Blew Up America

They say its some terrorist,
some barbaric
A Rab,
in Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn't
The gonorrhea in costume
The white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say?)
Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble

Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who define art
Who define science

Who made the bombs
Who made the guns

Who bought the slaves, who sold them

Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane

Who? Who? Who?

Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers

Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army

Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war

Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger

Who own this city

Who own the air
Who own the water

Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the ocean

Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio

Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners

Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws

Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying

Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who know who decide
Jesus get crucified

Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide

Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival

Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie

Who? Who? Who?

Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane,
Betty Shabazz, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone,
Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin's head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids
Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"

Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal,
The New Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs,
Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys,
The Hollywood Ten

Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

Who? Who? Who?

Explosion of Owl the newspaper say
The devil face cd be seen

Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national
oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.

Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful

Who you know ever
Seen God?

But everybody seen
The Devil

Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO who who
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

Copyright 2002. Amiri Baraka.

As for 9/11, the Pentagon plane crash really never made any sense to me. Where was the wreckage of the plane? That it was hit by a missile then makes more sense.

And as for troops in Afghanistan, I went to school with Capt. Jasper who was bombed by American pilots stoked up on amphetamins. I never really thought when we were groing up that Joey would be bombed in Afghanistan by Americans. That seems as unreal to me as a conspiracy to bring down the Twin Towers.

If Canadian troops leave Afghanistan, I am sure the American Empire would not be happy but will get by and protect that Unocal pipeline that they are building through Afghanistan to the coast.

(I had an unfortunate task one time of transcribing an article for the Afghan Embassy in Tokyo where Japan's ambassador ad naseum repeated the importance of the pipeline. Not security for Afghanis mind you, but rather the pipeline.)

btc
I'm chasing you thru the jungle - have you checked your email. You're posting poetry here and I'm posting Malcolm Lowry on the Mexico site - go figure!

bob the cat,THANK YOU,F@%KING AWESOME !

really appreciate the enlightenment...

G, Did you know there's a ten thousand dollar reward for anyone who can prove they actually made it all the way through Under the Volcano and any one of Margaret Atwood's books in the same lifetime.

Strange day THomas, strange day

So, btc, who?

How do I claim it?

lowry and atwood in the same day,what kind of sadistic lit teacher thought that up ?

i'm laughing like a fool at that proposal,heavy,ponderous,plodding,god ,i would need a couple of 40 pounders of tequila for that.

thomas
lifetime, not day - that would be above and beyond.

Truman...maybe you can tell me?

White AngloSaxon death cult? I dunno...

bob the cat:
Most definitely concur with your last post, especially after a couple of Shirley's older sisters and their friend MJ. %->

oh yes,i see,the cuervo is giving my receptors a slightly abstract message to relate from the time it gets here to the time it gets there...

oh,what a day,think i'm gonna pour myself into bed.

maybe read some more poetry,got baraka's site bookmarked and am looking forward to some more investigation of that mans mind...

I agree bob, Leroi seems to talking about the white devils. Being from a black family myself I can report to you that black people can be every bit as evil and opportunistic as white people.

Baraka's a racist, eh.

margaret atwood is awful. but if you're a member of the lefty toronto intelligentsia i'm adrienne clarkson and you're not crowd you have to love her. not like her. love her. pretentious? moi?

elliot,i am either too hung over to disagree or my mind is saying look,he does make sense,once in awhile...

barakas is a racist,we all are,it is covert in the general population and overt in people who don't live by the conventions of societys norms anymore.people like barakas have just had,enough of the yoke of the white mans ways and will rant and rail at every chance available.i would also guess he has converted to being a muslim and a radical one to boot.when the yoke of oppression gets too burdensome you have the art of war being manifested in little caves from the boroughs of manhattan to the hills of afghanistan to the indonesian islands.

damn,i have to stay away from jose,that man is a real bad influence,he has got me reading things and pondering,did i really say that ?

lowry and atwood in the same day,sheesh,is my face red ,or what???

thomas49
no worries
if Truman Green ever gets back with that offer of 10G we'll form a line....remember how volcano ends? ...Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

that tequila - the worm'll get ya.

Hi G. Okey, I lied abou the ten grand, but really, did you actually get to the end of an Atwood? Which one? Heaven knows I'll read just about anything. I really tried but my mind just kept wandering. She's probably the worst famous writer who ever lived, but how come she's known as one of Canada's best?

Talk about hoaxes!

I worked on Under The Volcano, too. Couldn't keep interested. Are you sure you actually finished these books?

Okey, quickly now, can you come up with one interesting idea she ever wrote? No googling, eh.

thomas,
you have a finely honed sense of irony, look at this:

This just in. Harper's trying to persuade Karzai to intervene in a muslim court's decision to kill a muslim who converted to Christianity--in guess where--Afghanistan. Even Condoleeza phoned the Afgan pres but apparently he doesn't want to piss off the muslim clerics who think the West should mind its own business if they want to kill a guy for converting.

Great little country they got over there.

Baraka sure knows how to pick a cult, alright.

Truman
You're a nice guy but a little slow off the mark - look around here at the Tyee - the story's cold.
Have you read "Surfacing"? Give it a try...some thoughtful ideas about Canadian identity; Oryx and Crake's not bad either and there are some interesting ideas in The Handmaid's Tale. It's mostly dystopian stuff so you have to have a taste for crumbling civilizations and society gone wrong.,people expect Science fiction but that's not what she's about at all, imo... She's really a scientist in disguise describing cause and effect, very tied to today and logical conclusions - Atwood that is.

Volcano, on the other hand is, imo, unbelieveably great - on a par with Dante - maybe one of the best 'modern' novels ever written - the only shame is Lowry burned himself out and died at 47.
Was it a waste? I dunno, the book is quite a monument.
Try it again, you have to let yourself go - if you read it like a critic you'll never get it - not meant to be enjoyed - it's meant to take you over and inhabit your mind...almost the way tequila and mescal do...gives the reader a new way to look at the world: That of the drunk who can only cope with the day to day reality of the pain he lives in...by descending daily into a kind of Inferno - a living hell in which the alcohol fuels his art even as it is destroying him and his relationships with the world around him. And it's also the story of the pain and cost of being a writer...where inspiration comes from and how it eats one up - providing insights and destroying at the same time - like a snake eating its tail....like looking into the volcano.

lowry's writng is intense and liberating,you keep thinking,damn i wish i could have talked to this man.i remember the CBC had a canadian writers series ,one show highlighting lowry and his work and any available media while he lived in vancouver.it was pretty basic but if you like being informed you have to see it.

atwood ? G West ,you provide a very good description of her ideology,the presentation of doom and gloom by the intelligensia is pretty daunting reading.the hanmaids tale was made into a cbc production wasn't it? i remember dating a lovely young woman who was a total sychophant when it came to maggie ,as the incrowd are used to calling atwood,her fans are very protective of her and if you hate her like me,well you don't want to be dating one of her fans.

that bush piece i read when it first came out and i could not believe it.i really like bill mahar and i was wondering why he was calling barbra bush,a bitch? after reading the article,it all fell into place and i realized we all have to be nasty at the right times otherwise people like the BUSHITES keep breeding...

Gerhardius, I know that this thread is about Afghanistan and the question of whether or not Canadians should be fighting there, and if they are going to be, what are they fighting for? As Nana (I'm a male nana or grandparent myself) pointed out to begin with - if the 9/11 story is a lie, maybe the true reasons for being in Afghanistan are something different than the pablum we are force fed by Can-West and PeeWee PlumperBoy.

Anyway, I'm glad you brought up the building in Madrid that burned in 2005, I remember when that was happening. A few things you didn't mention, or maybe didn't notice about that incident are:

1. That fire started before midnight and burned all through the next day.

2. That fire involved the whole building above the 2nd floor although it started apparently on the 21st floor. (See picture of fire with building totally involved on page you supplied link for)

3. After all that the building still wasn't a pile of dust sitting in its own footprint (like a controlled demolition)

4. Actually the hulk of the building was still standing after the fire was out, in need of being demmolished. (Again, see picture on page you supplied the link for)

Some people just don't believe governments would ever lie or engage in "false flag" operations. I suggest you research some incidents like:

1. the attack(?) of the Maine in Cuba that was used as a pretext for the Spanish American war and American land grabs in the Carribean and the Phillipines.

2. CristallNacht in Germany before WWII which was used to demonize the Jews and get the Germans to support actions that thankfully wound up being dealt with at Nuremburg.

3. The imaginary Tonkin Gulf Incident which was used to justify the Vietnam misadventure.

I suppose it is irrelevant to people like yourself, G. West, elliot the idiot, murdock et. al. that the same crew of incompetents that are now trying to remake the Middle East and world were, in the nineties, drawing up the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which made clear that in order to pursue their vision a "Pearl Harbor type event" would be required to get the American sheeple onside.

Somebody said that, even assuming 9/11 wasn't sideways, Bush's response was just like FDR's - if FDR had invaded Mexico after Pearl Harbor.

Truman..Barakas who is The Ruling Class

regardless of color..it would seem rather obvious that a large number of the Ruling Class are white...Baraka is no racist

thanks for that Thomas - I think I saw the CBC Lowry piece; there's a body of academic thought - i think a guy called Douglas Day wrote a biography of Lowry and I'm sure there are others - that maintains his dipsomania and guilt grew out of an obsession that started in childhood when he went to see, of all things, a syphilis 'museum' somewhere or other.

In any case, it probably had a sexual and obsessive overtones - Freudian stuff of course but how can you understand modern literature without Freud looking over your shoulder. Shades of current events - not all that far from ground zero, eh?

there are examples through history of countries using machinations of the extreme ,to start conflicts,no one in their right mind will deny.

but, to embellish an already perfect storm is really out there.any situation can be picked apart by armchair quarterbacks,you can see that daily right here on these threads.would you put anyone here in control of an investigation of you and your actions ?

there are constant machinations in politics,in the military,the church,the schoolboard,that is no issue.what is an issue is that most of the onlookers have no experience whatsoever investigating anything but their navels.

this is high tech information ,that even experts fight over as shown,but under the perfect storm scenario,when sh!t happens ,it happens BIGTIME.

and listening to a drug addled charlie sheen who saw this happening when he was at his worst in imbibing alcohol and snorting whatever,really pushes the envelope.

it shows how gullible people are,charlie sheen the movie star said it so it must be true,and they don't even investigate where charlie was,or what he was doing...was'nt he in rehab,didn't he just get out,where the hell was he and in what state of mind.

i may be hung over at the moment but,i do remember my history and i also remember what kind of people we have spawned over the ages.

and looking back ,nothing surprises me,but i really look under every rock if i want to find the kind of creatures you are talking about.

rkewen:

Excellent points.

Thomas 49:

So, like, your trying to say in your own hung over stooper that you weren't already thinking what Charlie said, or would say if you were in his de-railed, coked out, drunken, liver swollen, eyes shut shoes? Charlie took the words right out of my mouth.

it's evident what i said.

regardless of my condition,i would investigate til i was confident what was under those rocks,just because there is a mass of squirming beasties doesn't mean i have found the culprit.

which beastie is it ? and is this even the right rock to be looking under ?

a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in some minds.

Correction;

Last nite I said that Neil Bush, that unindicted robber of Silverado Savings and Loan, was in charge of security at the World Trade Center just prior to 9/11. I think it was another spawn of that female version of Satan, descendent of a man who plotted the (unsuccessful) overthrow of Abraham Lincoln, Marvin Bush.

Babs whose beautiful mind can't be bothered thinking of body bags with other peoples sons and daughters in them and felt that the poor blacks in New Orleans were probably enjoying Katrina and all the perks it brought them. Her ancestor probably didn't realize that the slaves had to be freed so they would have bodies to send to Vietnam, Iraq and (country name here?). Modern day rethuglicans offspring won't go, no matter how much they "support" the war. Supporting the war requires more than a bumper sticker on the SUV.

The audio version of Charlie Sheen:"Challenge me on the facts"
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/240306sheen.htm
Transcript:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2006/240306challengeme.htm

It is very non-surprising that the only high ranking member of the Bush Crime Family Administration that wasn't gung-ho about invading Iraq was the only one that had actually seen war other than on the screen or in a comic book. I used to have a great deal of respect for Colin Powell, but since he allowed himself to be so used by the evil cabal and unlike even his own subordinates still packs the Crime Family water he is just another part of the problem. Condi and Colin - Auntie and Uncle Tom - what you want massa?

Nana
Thank you for the link I will take a look at it. The reason DU is used by the US instead of Tungsten, is that DU is “self-sharpening” as it cuts through the armour, whereas Tungsten becomes blunter forcing it to carve a bigger path through the armour.

Truman
The Vietnam war was not a hoax but a direct result of 3 factors, The rise of Communism in China, and the desire of the French post-war to regain their colony, clashing with the rise in Vietnamese nationalism. In fact the leader of the Vietnamese who fought side by side with the Americans asked them to support his country’s bid for independence, they declined under pressures from the French, The Vietnamese were then forced to approach the communists, who had built up a fair network during the fight with the Japanese. The French made a hash of their fight with the Vietnamese and the battle ended up become a proxy war between East and West. The US basically won, then signed a peace treaty, left leaving behind a corrupt and inefficient government and then the North broke the treaty, swept down on the South and won the final battle. Shortly thereafter limited war broke out between Vietnam and China, interestingly enough Vietnam gave China a bloody nose.

Murdock
The definition of Peacekeeper is easy to define, it is the “mushy” use of the term by decades of Liberals that has caused the confusion. If the right conditions do not exist, then neither can Peacekeepers.

Gwest
My friend grew up in N. Van and as a kid they moved Malcolm’s outhouse back a few feet and listened to him fall in while drunk, they got a good walloping for doing by their parents when they found out. Malcolm wrote about hell across the water. Apparently the Shell refinery across the way had a big lit sign, which the S had burnt out for awhile and he could see it from his shack.

I find it amazing that people believe that 9-11 was manufactured, the number of people required to carry it out who would have to live with the knowledge that they killed 3,000 of their own people is so far fetched. It puts it into a realm far beyond, the staging of the attack Ed mention or even the Tonkin affair. I guess I have a greater faith in the American people than others here.

Colin
Yeh! I heard that story too, about the vanished 'S' - the one abt the outhouse is new, thanks. Not the only time Lowry stumbled and ended up in the 'shit' I'm afraid...but usually it was completely of his own doing... the cause I mean, not necessarily the shit. (You have to be so careful with words, don't you? Everything can be metaphoric. Even terms like ‘pull’ it seems ; =)
There's a fascinating book, can't remember the title but I'm sure they'd have a copy at VPL or at UBC (obviously wouldn't be in print anymore) of the correspondence between Lowry and his publisher prior to the book being printed and put on the market - at first to almost no interest.

Colin, you attribute qualities to people like Dick "other priorities - 5 deferments" Cheney, or Don "Avian Flu is already making me rich" Rumsfeld or G. W. Bush's ancestors one of whom conspired against Lincoln - another who did bizness with the Nazis up till and right through the war that they lack entirely. They have no trouble sleeping at night, they are sociopaths who are only interested in themselves and their greed and power.

I'm not saying they dreamed up the whole thing out of whole cloth - after all there are people in the world who don't like America, in fact these days that is probably more people than not. But they certainly didn't do anything to stop it, indeed stomped on anyone that tried to stop it and have done everything in their power since to obstruct an honest thorough investigation.

Doesn't it strike you as weird that the Bushs and bin Ladens are practically extended family and bin Ladens were some of the few people allowed to fly over and out of the US right after 9/11, without being even debriefed, though some had dealings with alleged hi-jackers. This while Americans were stranded in Atlantic Canada, Hawaii and all over the world because they couldn't fly home.

These sociopaths are on a mission of a type not seen since Hitler's dreams of World Dominance. 3000 deaths, even of Americans is a small price to pay when you consider the power they've used it to leverage. Besides it's not like any of those who died that day were part of the Bush/Cheney Crime Family or their cronies.

By the way some people think that Charlie Sheen is an unwitting tool of the people with the most to hide and/or lose. It's becoming too hard to discredit all the scientists, architects, engineers etc. who have legitimate questions about the official story - so lets air it in public via an actor with drug problems, relationship problems and so forth - much easier to mock than a professor in the engineering department at BYU or U of Utah, for some reason though his school has been trying to stop him from speaking in public and airing his questions.

Jeez, this couldn't have anything to do with federal research funding, could it? Academic and Scientific freedoms are taking a real sh*tkicking along with all the other freedoms in the good old Kingdom of King George the Idiot non-savant.

bob the cat,i have read amiri baraka's remarks concerning the isrealis and their supposed complicity in the 9/11 attack and if being an anti semite is not being a racist,i may have forgotten how to use the english language and lets not play with the word bigotry either,there are more than enough white references that dont attach themselves to jews in his works . whether he is or isn't,does not matter to me when i read his work,the power is there,those of us intelligent enough to know,we are all self involved and that means anyone different is in the back of our mind(back of the bus) and we all practice discrimination,it is inherent in our nature.

colin,you must be one of the handful of people on the face of the planet to think the americans won in viet nam.i was almost starting to believe you knew what you were talking about til i read that statement.you always ask people to post evidence of their statements veracity,why don't you post those examples so we can be enlightened.

Colin wrote:

.

I already explained why the people who "carried it out" have no trouble sleeping at night. The thing is it doesn't take very many to carry it out. OK a lot of people have to do or not do a lot of different things, but most of them don't have to know why. For example the fighter pilots that didn't scramble and challenge and/or shoot down the wandering airliners weren't in on the plan, they were following orders, orders in this case to stand down. Do you remember a few years back when a Korean Airliner wandered into inappropriate airspace over the North Pacific- it didn't get very far did it, within minutes it was shot out of the sky, passengers and all - and it wasn't approaching New York City or Washington DC. How could four planes wander all over the Northeastern United States all morning without air control and SAC and NORAD all going cuckoo. They didn't all have to be in on it either. Very few had to be in on it.

In fact since Dubya himself was pretty much missing in action, or just staying out of the way, Cheney and Rumsfeld could pretty well carry it off as long as every one below them followed their orders. In Rumsfeld's case its more like no one could find him to get instructions until after the missle or whatever hit the part of the Pentagon that was under construction. I mean, he's just the Secretary of "Defense" and the US was only being attacked - he's sure good at it, eh? Then he swung into action having civilian staff pick up incriminating evidence on the lawn and federal agencies scooping any embarassing surveillance tapes that might not show an airliner.

Colin:
I have greater faith in Americans too! But their leadership completely and utterly sucks. And could GWB sleep knowing he roasted 3,000 of his own? They were the worlds own, Colin. As GWB senior likely put it to his son, "To make an omlette, sometimes, you've got to break a few eggs."

What a wonderful way to get world support for the next "war on terror". I can see GWB and his cronies passing a dead baby roast between themselves, no problem, snacking on an arm or a leg all casual like, as though it was regular roast beef, talking about the have's and occasionally, negatively, the have nots between flesh tears off of femors, and that's just take out!! I can easily see them inviting their moms and dads and kids over for more of the same menu on the dinner table at home. Can't you?

thomas49

Is being anti Zionist (Greater Israel) antisemitic?

Baraka was responding to the information that Mossad had prior intelligence of the attack and informed the Americans. Of course Mossad informed any Israelis who would be at risk...the Americans
possibly chose not to act on the information?

http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html

Thomas49

Barakas explanation (defense) of the racist charges.

rkewen wrote:

2. That fire involved the whole building above the 2nd floor although it started apparently on the 21st floor. (See picture of fire with building totally involved on page you supplied link for)

3. After all that the building still wasn't a pile of dust sitting in its own footprint (like a controlled demolition)

4. Actually the hulk of the building was still standing after the fire was out, in need of being demmolished. (Again, see picture on page you supplied the link for)

The initial structural failure occurred approximately 2.5 hours after the fire began. The collapse was limited to the steel surrounding the concrete core. The collapsed floors did fall relatively neatly onto the 17th floor, which was still structurally sound because it was concrete. What if the 17th had been steel like the collapsed floors above? Would the collapse have continued leaving the core as the sole structural element standing? The failure stopped where it met the concrete structure of the 17th floor and where it met the core. These are pretty straight forward facts and highlight one of the major structural/material differences between the WTC and the Madrid building. We know the core of the WTC was damaged and we know there weren't any concrete floors spread throughout the structure.

1. the attack(?) of the Maine in Cuba...
2. CristallNacht...
3. The imaginary Tonkin Gulf Incident....

These facts have what bearing on the issues of 9/11? The Maine blew up after somebody made a mistake in the wrong place and destroyed their own ship; Kristallnacht was the action and not the incident (the "assassination" of a Nazi official in Paris was the "Pearl Harbour" of Kristallnacht for Goebells et al), Tonkin was a hoax. These events have no bearing on whether the 9/11 events are part of a massive conspiracy. You seem to be implying that, if we disagree with you in the case of the WTC we must also be duped by other "manufactured" events that led to crises. The events you specified all have one thing in common: simplicity. The Maine blew up, and the Hearst papers did the rest; a Nazi diplomat was assassinated in Paris and Kristallnacht was the "spontaneous" response; a Destroyer captain claims contact, the President runs to Congress and gets carte blanche. In the case of 9/11, couldn't the same result been had by conducting "false flag" operations far less complex than those needed to bring down the towers? Why not simply blow up the buildings? Why not release a non-persistent nerve gas from a crop duster over a blue state? The WTC makes sense as a target only as a symbol of US imperialism, but the towers held little significance for the US populace until 9/11.

http://www.9eleven.info/911JonesPaperhtm7.htm

Jones areas of interest
Research Group: Atomic, Molecular, and Optical
Specialty: Metal-catalyzed fusion, Archaeometry, Solar energy

I think we have to get to agreement that the towers fell by controlled demolition in order to make any sense of 9/11. There's lots of time for speculation about other evidence and evidence of complicity. Volcanos, undersea landslides and controlled demolitions are the only things that can generate pyroclastic flows.
http://www.plaguepuppy.net/public_html/collapse%20update/

Colin, you have presented the real causes of the war accurately but the Lynden Johnson claimed Americans were fighting there to prevent the domino effect--let Vietnam go communist and all of Southeast Asia will follow. THAT's the hoax I was talking about.
The conflict was basically a civil war before the Americans got there.

oh my god, nana's still here.

rkewen wrote:

Not irrelevant at all, Bush Sr. surprised the world in 1992 when he did not drive to Baghdad with the coalition tanks. I am certain that many in the 'allied' camp wanted him to do just that. But Colin Powell was already thru a war without end and justification. The UN mandate did not involve creating such a giant power vacuum. Nor have the US troops ever been good at 'after-combat' policing situations. The UK troops were not prepared to take up the policing roles either (nor do they seem to be so good at it currently).

It was with some surprise that many (Blair also I think) agreed with the materials put forward by Colin Powell in 2002. The 'lies' stuck in his throat and took some time to come out; I personally think that was a big reason why Colin Powell bailed on this administration. He was rightly proud in 1992, he did not create a new Vietnam. His pride was dashed in 2002 as his cache was instrumental in creating the new Vietnam in the exact location that he was able to stop it in before.

Saying that this is exactly the same ones 'in power' as in 1991 is an exaggeration. These people may have had positions of some authority in the whitehouse of 1991, but they did not 'call the shots'.

Back then better council prevailed.

Now the Hawks are loose and no-one is willing to master them.

Bob the Cat, I just read your Baraka link. I admit I basically agreed with what he had to say. I apologize for calling him a racist, but I thought he might have mentioned some of the evil things black people have done too, like maybe Rawandans cutting each other up with machetes or Mobutu Sese Seko basically stealing almost the entire wealth of Zaire during his American CIA-supported reign of terror.

Thanks for that link. It was very good.

Colin goes Orwellian:

It is the Canadian public that are deluding themselves that this current mission to Afghanistan is a Peacekeeping one, hence the twisted term Peacemaker that was being used for a while. I note that in many media reports the soldiers are still being referred to as peacekeepers while the conditions you mention are not present for peacekeepers to be deployed. How can the conditions be present when there is only one side to be 'kept apart' or to have the 'peace' 'made' for them?

Our Newt World Order does not include Declarations of War as the olde world did, therefore our PMO can take on 'Imperial' airs and send our young fighting men off to die for their own aims.

This is wrong, Darth Cretinous has already been shoved out of the way by his back-stabbing sucessor Mr. Dithers; so they cannot be held accountable, now it is for the current government to fix the situation, but they will not as it appears the Zoo on the Rideau is marching to tunes played by Clueless George, the White House drummer boy.

If anything would push PQ out of 'le canada' faster than any mention of conscription I should like to know what it is...

Watch your sons closely Canadian Parents and make sure that they understand what assignation of their lives to service of the Queen means, I already am.

Murdock wrote:

.

Before you quote me you should try to understand what I said. I didn't say these incompetents were in charge in 1991, though some of them were involved with Gulf War 1. Read the quote you copied and pasted, and try to comprehend what the words actually mean, if you can manage that.

i.e.

My kids had better grasp of language before they went to school. What I said was that in the nineties (during Clinton's administration) they (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Hadley, Libby, Kristol etc.) were drawing up the Project for a New American Century. No one (in the current government) would act on it until Chimporer had been selected to be Preznit and they had created/allowed/helped along or just been damn lucky and hit the jackpot with their Pearl Harbor type event.

Ever since they've been on a power trip shredding the constitution, killing people in any country they choose and using fear and lies to keep the American sheeple on side. Fortunately more and more Americans seem to be seeing through the smoke and mirrors - that's why it's scary now. I'm afraid they realize another orange or red alert won't cut it anymore and might have to actually have a genuine (staged) terra event to avoid proscecution for war crimes and theft.

rkewen postulates:

ok, so shall we stop with the national socialist comparisons? I cannot see the link to Hitler nor any of his ilk in the Bush group.

I can see a direct comparison to the end of the Roman Republic and the start of the Roman Empire, so does Andre Gerelamatis of Simon Fraser, he has said as much on Rafe's old show.

Just as a limited number of families or 'houses' came to control the resources of the Republic of Rome, so now a limited number of families or 'corporations' have come to dominate the resource control of the American Republic. Once these families come to think they are firmly in 'control' of the levers of power they will always behave this way.

Stop thinking of them as a crime syndicate unless you are also seeing any 'nation-state' government as this way.

Look up the meaning of Facism - whatever you want to call it locally. The corporation and the government act as one - but it ain't socialism in the socialized medicine sense.

Bush's forebears did lotsa bizness with the Nazis, Grandpappy almost got charged with treason at one point, but it has perks to be part of the power elite. He did lose a bank over it, but to the Bush Crime Family that was a slap on the wrist, the cost of doing bidness.

The Germans and Japanese had visions of Empire dancing in their perverted brains in the 30's and 40's for the same reason the DC cabal has them today, for access to and control of resources. Sharing is for wimps, and might makes right. If the Chimporer does it or wants to do it, it is obviously legal, for him, because he is the unrinary, oops, I mean unitary excecutive.

If George Bush decides you are an enemy combatant - have a good time in Cuba dude! or whatever black hole they render you to.

It's not either it's Rome or it's Berlin. It's both. A few years back I did a search for "Bush Crime Family" on Google and got 44 pages of entries.

I think Barbara Bush is definitely "personality disordered", which is the current neutral term for sociopath/psychopath,since one of the symptoms is the inability to empathise. Shrub looks more like a victim of one, than one himself.

Robert Hare of UBC,who was interviewed for The Corpoation and whose ideas formed the basic premise of the film put out a book years ago called "Without Concience". I think it's a necessary read to understand out times. The personality disordered occor in the general populace at about 1 in 100. That's really a lot of people, considering how destructive they are.

The biggest problem most of us have, is spotting them. Most are very personable and read people very easily and feed them what they think the marks want to hear. Hare says they are in all professions....that sure explains most politicians doesn't it.

Criminals are very definitly in charge of the world starting with what are charmingly called The Banksters. Prescott Bush( Ike's constant companion and golfing partner) had only 1 percent of the shares in the Union Bank, which exchanged Reichmarks for US$. Most of the shares were owned by Avril Harriman (railroads, Brown Bros. Harriman). AH was Roosevelts right hand man in Europe after the war and he became govenor of NY State in the 50s. His last wife was Pamela, daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill and the woman who introduced Bill Clinton to Wash. D.C. society....after he'd been vetted out by the Bilderbergers.

The oligarchy has very definitely been in charge for a long time

Nana observes:

Just as the Claudian and Julian lines had been 'in charge' of much of the late Roman Republic, directing the use of resources and making sure that the profits, of either finacial gain or goodwill went in their direction. No different than any other organization's desires, the only difference in this case is that the Bush clan has been more successful than the others recently. Will it stay that way? History says that it will not, but that the transition will not be pleasant.

rkewen postulates:

I did.

The most important reference is in connection with the expansion of nazi:

National Socialism; a 'nationalized' for of an anti-materialist state.

more completely:
Although the broadest definitions of fascism may include every authoritarian state that has ever existed, most theorists see important distinctions to be made. Fascism in Italy arose in the 1920s as a mixture of syndicalist notions with an anti-materialist theory of the state; the latter had already been linked to an extreme nationalism. Fascism in many ways seems to have been clearly developed as a reaction against Communism and Marxism, both in a philosophic and political sense, although it opposed democratic capitalist economics along with socialism, Marxism, and liberal democracy. It viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect collective and individual rights, or as one that should be held in check. It tended to reject the Marxist notion of social classes (and universally dismissed the concept of class conflict), replacing it instead with two more nebulous struggles: conflict between races and the struggle of the youth versus their elders. This meant embracing nationalism and mysticism, and advancing ideas of strength and power as means of legitimacy, a might makes right that glorified war as an end in itself and determinant of truth and worthiness. An affinity to these ideas can be found in Social Darwinism. These ideas are in direct opposition to the ideas reason or rationalism characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment, from which liberalism and, later, Marxism would emerge.

Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production. Fascism exalts the nation, state, or race as superior to the individuals, institutions, or groups composing it. Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, often to the point of a cult of personality.

Fascism attracted political support from diverse sectors of the population, including big business, farmers and landowners, nationalists, and reactionaries, disaffected World War I veterans, intellectuals such as Gabriele D'Annunzio, Curzio Malaparte and Martin Heidegger to name a few, conservatives and small businessmen, and the poor to whom they promised work and bread.

The word has become a slur throughout the political spectrum since the failure of the Axis powers in World War II, and it has been extremely uncommon for any political groups to call themselves "fascist" since 1945. In contemporary political discourse, adherents of some political ideologies tend to associate fascism with their enemies, or define it as the opposite of their own views. There are no major self-described fascist parties or organizations anywhere in the world.

Bush and co are nowhere near any kind of internal control over the US or any of its institutions, they have exerted control over the resources and access to them in the same way that the Julian line exerted control over the extraction of resources from Gaul and Egypt towards Rome. You do not see the white house able or willing to exert any kind of social controls, but with a 'war' or 'enemy' they can scare the population into line, for without the external threats to the US I think the current occupant of the oval office would be seen for the naked monkey that he is.

for rkewen

references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/MOD/mussolini-fascism.html
http://www.remember.org/hist.root.what.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761568245/Fascism.html

Just so that you may understand why I ask that the nazi and hitler references to bush and co stop.

Whenever I read that in the starting of a text, article, post etc I stop reading any further as I see the writer as trying to draw too long a bow. The linkage is weak at best and more often than not becomes hysterical in the content and tone.

Should you want to be read by more of the other commentators here on Tyee I suggest using other allegory and try to present cogent arguments rather than the linkage to the darkest figures from the past that have little or no direct influence on the subject matter at hand.

Murdoch...last time it was the Jews...this time it's the Muslims. Same play, different actors. In the meantime there have been rumours of US concentration camps, at least 1 per state. A subsidiary of Halliburton got a contract to run/build some...don't you just love public/private partnerships?

I think the fine point you want to draw on the origin of this madness we're being subjected to is just a bit fancy-pants. Sociopaths use any script that comes along that works. The Nazis did a great job getting a rational people to do irrational things against their own interests.
And for heaven sake...who ever heard of an American using the term "Homeland" before Shrub.

As to "darkest figures from the past etc" think about "Operation Paperclip".

And haven't we all been struck by the similarities with "1984", talk about taking over a script.
Britain ...with video cams on every street...which strangely never seem to work...anywhere when you need them!

I vote for Nazorwelian! Would that be more to your liking perhaps?

George Orwell, 1945. Notes on Nationalism

Wonderful quote. Dead on.

Actually, I thought of another parallel between the Nazis and the Americans.

Else Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald morphing into Lyndie England, Pathetic Creature of Abu Graib.

History...first time tragedy, second time comedy.

your pathos is quite stunning,i would think you have been studying human nature out of the corner of your eyes for some time.

scientists tell us there are no two snowflakes alike and i cannot believe that,i think they are full of sh!t.just as i do not belive human beings are all that different now in this time than any other time in history.

so first time tragedy to me says that there really is no first time we can really use as a benchmark and your example is just use of pathos to get us to accept your poorly thought out statement .
we are more alike than we wish to acknowledge and we distance ourselves with all kinds of examples.you just provided yours.providing the people you did shows me we are more alike, because the span of time and circumstances bring both people into similar circumstances,like a paralell universe in which we are condemned to live over our mistakes throughout eternity or til we get it right,that kharmic bullsh!t.

when you read,lord of the flies the first time,it is with doubt in your heart that we could be so defined,but the second time you read it,you are nodding your head in affirmation because you recognize the players.

put anyone in those situations and we all revert back to our base mentality and that is the primitive creature we hide every day,our id.

first time a tragedy,when did we break our virginity ? second time a comedy?i don't think any of us here were around for that because it came to close in time to the first.if you really want to put forth an example,just look in the mirror,we are all capable of horrific deeds,some just get caught in history.

like your examples...

and repeating mistakes of that nature is not a comedic event in any stretch of the imagination.

Thanks for illustrating what I've been saying all along, Murdock: From your expostulation to educate my bird brain.

"conflict between races "
See current protests in LA, see treatment of poor blacks in New Orleans as opposed to white hurricane victims in Florida

"This meant embracing nationalism" See "Mission Accomplished", see imposing American Democracy on the world at the point of a gun, and how many flags are required to be on stage with the Preznit?

"and mysticism"

See Jerry Fallwell, Itelligent Design, Pat Robertson, Faith Based Social Services funded by Federal Government, W Bush seeks advice from a higher father instead of G. H. Bush, his (most likely embarrassed) biological father, who actually had his own war in Iraq, which went a lot better.

.

"state control "
How's about warrantless wiretaps of peace groups, attorney/client and doctor/patient conversations, and warrantless physical searches and what about all those detention camps that Halliburton is building (no bid, of course).

They control the political by manipulating elections, gerrymandering congressional districts and having their corporate buddies count the votes that have been touch screened into oblivion on black boxes.

"social"
These suits want to control women's bodies, see Rapist's Rights Bill in South Dakota

.

They don't actually control business, business actually owns the government, and they have the best government they can buy when it comes to protecting their interests - they are the same people anyway - See Halliburton, Big Oil, Big Pharma

The American general who said his God was better than the Muslims' god - hell we're in the crusades again - it's like deja vu all over again.

When it comes to loyalty to a single leader, voila, we have the Chimporer and he is loyal to Big Time,"other priorities" Cheney -

Solve the energy shortage with the biggest military on earth, to hell with alternative energy etc.

.

Of course this is the only Darwinism they believe in

.

Sounds like the Bush Crime Family to me.

You should work on your comprehension of stuff that you read, not just what I write either.

thomas
i give up.
there are, it seems, some torrents which, no matter how high one builds the dam to contain them - no matter what resources one musters in an effort to dissipate the flow, are going to find their way down the mountain into the slough of despond.
time to move on.
everything is turned around on itself - Swift would not be surprised he's been supplanted by Charlie Sheen: Gulliver has arrived back from his adventure with many tales to tell.
have a fine day.

A good reason to demand that our troops be brought home
Depleted Uranium For Dummies

By Irving Wesley Hall

"At last count, more than 1,000 tons have been used in Afghanistan and more than 3,000 tons in Iraq. Significantly, most Gulf War tours of duty were short. Three quarters of today's troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have served multiple tours: 26% are on their first tour of duty, 45% are on their second tour, and 29% are in Iraq for a third time or more. Some are now being ordered to a fourth tour of duty.

Simple math suggests that depleted uranium may eventually prove a hundred times more deadly to our forces than all the Iraqi resistance fighters' improvised explosive devices (I.E.D.s) and rocket propelled grenades (R.P.G.'s) combined."

http://www.countercurrents.org/hall230306.htm

http://www.freedomtofascism.com/
Trailer for new movie by Aaron Russo

http://www.bushflash.com/14.html
14 Defining characteristics of fascist regimes

Are you from the U.S., Nana? I promise, I won't am"bush" you with the answer, scouts honor, just curious.

Nana, have you looked into the MKNAOMI projects in any detail? Any conclusions?

It's simply amazing where a thread will go.

Could someone please tell me a wee bit of history.

I am trying to learn the precise date and time that Canada declared war on Afghanistan or declared war on specific Afghani citizens.

Did the prime minister (as opposed to a paid general with lots of political conflicts), actually sign a document, make a proclamation or take an order from someone else to commit Canada and Canadian troops to a war in Afghanistan?

Please, if you answer, be specific rather than saying something vague and dumb like it was on 9/11.

I understand the Taliban are a mean an nasty bunch, much like the people who run U.S. military prisons at home and, especially, abroad.

But I simply can't find anything anywhere to justify Canada taking up an invasionary operation within a foreign country without a debate or at least a justified declaration.

And if anyone has those dates, might they also have a reason why Canadian soldiers are apparently on the same side of the Afghani war as the warlords who operate or control the poppy fields and subsequent lucrative drug trade.

I mean, I thought we were supposed to be on the side that fights against the international trafficking of heroin.

Or have we joined America's war in drugs?

If anyone is really interesting in looking at 9/11 and not just Charlie Sheen's fevered imaginings, you'd be hard pressed to find a better place to start than this:
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/911book.htm

Edward J Epstein is the author and journalist who did more to debunk the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone when he shot John Kennedy than anyone else I'm aware of.

There are lots of interesting questions to be asked and answered. Not, for the most part, the ones you've been asking though.

Have a look. It'll take some time though.

So, while the theorists are having some fun doing that, maybe we can get back to the subject at hand.

Good one, allan, but under our parliamentary system our PM can send troops anywhere he likes, but your question really does go to the heart of things. We have no checks and balances on the imperial perogatives of the PM. He doesn't even have to trot out weapons of mass destruction or impending attacks on Vancouver Island, like Bush did.

You're right Allan, but understanding why Canada is riding in now to the support of whatever agenda the current US administration is advancing isn't the really important point, in my opinion.

This is really a fence-mending (perhaps that's a bad metaphor) exercise in the Prime Minister's continentalist and republican program - actually helping Afghanis (which is of course the current jargon in Ottawa and, almost invariably, in the media) is singularly divorced from what's going on, on the ground, as you observed.

The kind of real humanitarian, economic and infrastructure assistance, which could have had a lasting and positive impact in that country, should have been delivered immediately after hostilities ceased in the months before the American adventure on the ground in Iraq began. Instead, the US more or less gave up on its humanitarian financial and infrastructure rebuilding commitments at that time and Afghanistan since has been drifting sharply backwards into the mess that obtains there today, alas.

Canada had been trying to do something somewhat more positive, but still highly confused and not very well planned, in the intervening years. Our current efforts, leavened as they are by an appalling lack of good sense on the part of General Hillier and Mr. Harper’s rather pathetic attempt to look soldierly, are also conflicted by our own citizens (including, alas, many of our troops) confused understanding of what actual war is all about. The outcome is far from certain – one hopes it will not be too bloody.

Withal, it is just another step in fulfilling Harper's election promises to the diverse elements he sees as necessary to create a majority in the next election. I'm sure you've noticed his opening gambit to veterans’ organizations and concerns this past week as well. Things are, more or less, proceeding as expected.

Brain...I'm Canadian.
Truman...I never followed up on MKNAOMI until you asked. Did a seach on dogpile.com since I no longer trust google and came up with lots of interesting stuff.
G.West...may I recommend Jim Marr's book Crossfire to you...especially the appedix which shows the number of witnesses who died in the years following the Kennedy assasination. Particulaly striking were the numerous FBI agents who died of "hunting accidents" prior to their scheduled appearances before the House Committee on Assasinations.

I ran across a picture recently of a man looking suspiciously like George I in front of the Texas Book Depository. who can't remember where he was on Nov.22,1963.

Then there's the interesting factoid of J.Edgar Hoovers notes of the day saying he spoke to" Mr. George Bush of the CIA today". I remember As It Happens covering the story at the time of the publication of his notes after Hoover's death. There was another George Bush employed for only six months in a lowly position who was passed of as the person Hoover referred to...unlikely.

Harper's attempt to get the government off the hook for lifelong disability payments wouldn't go over well with veterans...especially since they are beginning to understand the deadly legacy of DU contamination.

nana
look at Epstein's site.

g west,you are so politically correct ! why don't you call harpers actions with the military and the veterans groups what it is ?
i have never done it it,but i hear it's really popular with politicians looking to win over detractors that are not quite sure as to what's happening.

military types know the tactic used as a reach around and civies call it,stroking...

OK, I looked at Epstein's site. First thing that aroused my suspicions was he doesn't make the connection between the American Media editor who died of antrax and the stories their tabloids printed on the drinking habits of the Bush Twins. Don't you find it peculiar to say the least that it was only the Democrats who were hit by anthrax?

The FBI never investigated Dr. Philip Zack who was caught on security cameras entering the lab where the Anthrax used in the letters was kept, after he had been fired for a racially motivated attack on a co-worker(the guy was a Moslem). So, why did the FBI waste its time with Steven Hatfill?

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/anthraxsuspect.html

The other thing that aroused my suspicions is that it is a totally self-supporting site....so who's the financial angel? Mossad?

thomas
actually, I think I did mention it before - except I did it in the context of what was likely to happen before the election actually took place - despite the fact that SH thinks he is the smartest thing since sliced bread - everything he's done (and is going to do) is pretty much predictable - and I ain't no conspiracy theorist - as you clearly know.
i hope there are at least a few veterans (among them people you and I know) who have the sense to know they're being finessed ( I actually prefer your term – the reach around, but you know what I mean) and won't fall for it - they should take the cash – which they richly deserve, imo, and keep their powder dry - that would be the ‘politically’ correct thing to do.
back at you dude!
Did you see my post about Wien, on the Cuba site?

nana
you didn't read everything epstein has on the site - there are several levels and much background information some of it you have to 'qualify' to even read - it takes at least a couple of hours, perhaps longer, to do that. Epstein is probably the most knowledgeable figure to investigate Oswald and the Kennedy assassination (outside of official Washington) and he's convinced Oswald acted alone.

There isn't any advertising on his site - why? Because he's not in it for publicity or the money, imo.

There's a lot more to real investation than flying off in all directions at the same time. THere are lots of interesting questions about 9-11 - almost none of them have anything to do with what you're on about, thank God.
cheers.

G.West, you say that Nana's questions about 911 are not important but that there are lots of interesting questions.

What "interesting questions" then, do YOU have then about 911. Let's see your list.

G. West, "no advertising no charges" seems to be a freudian slip to me. Millions of sites have "no advertising no charges."

This, of course, doesn't mean that Epstein's not been rewarding by a specific interest group to ridicule the ideas of conspiracists.

But, of course, you already know this. Don't you?

Truman
Go to Epstien's website, posted above, and have a look. I didn't say the questions weren't important to nana - they obviously are - i'm just convinced that she'd be better spending her time looking more closely at other, less flamboyant, but more, as you say 'interesting' errors and omissions and not getting sidetracked by the glitz and flash that's accompanying all the internet buzz about the things that have you guys exercised just now.

Take the afternoon and read everything he has to say, I think you'll find it time well wasted.
Cheers.

In fairness, I suppose Epstein does want to sell his books... although there's no overt pitches for them and the absence of links to amazon, powells etc is, at least to me, persuasive. He also writes infrequently about hollywood and the movies for Slate but he's chiefly known for his work and book on the JFK assassination. His debunking of Oliver Stone was pretty much classic - anyway, check it all out. The site is a bit annoying in that it has all kinds of levels and internal links and little qualifying quizzes - think of it as a challenge.

G.West, you said to Nana: "there are many interesting questions about 911 almost none of them have anything to do with what you're on about."

So, what questions to you have about 911 that are "interesting."

G, that little phrase of yours "important to her" is just a little trick. Yourunmistakable suggestion is that Nana doesn't know what she's talking about concerning 911, but YOU do.

g west,yes,i remember now,to bad i didn't remember earlier,but then again any time to air problems our vets have or will have is important.

nana,colin and others have been talking about the DU rounds that were employed and i really find the comments made,and pretty well ignored,a little disheartening.the fact our troops will be running around that sh!t leads me to believe the GULF WAR SYNDROME that no one admits to because it just does'nt exist ,will somehow manifest itself as the AFGHANI SYNDROME that takes healthy soldiers and turns them into cripples.
we know how the military like to disown any responsibility,we need only look at the poor slobs suffering from the gulf war syndrome and exacerbated by the it don't exist syndrome .

our troops put their ass' on the line they deserve better than they get most of the time and i don't like seeing harper in there bookkeeping,tells me the purse strings are going to be tightly held .they may be getting their equiptment(about time)but i don't think the troops well being after they come back has even been considered.

And, Truman, if you're interested, you might also enjoy reading this, on diversity and multiculturalism:
http://www.kenanmalik.com/tv/an_mc.html
not my cup of tea but the more you read - with some exceptions - the better

thomas
no question - way beyond my competency to offer an opinion on that - clearly if it's as bad as some say it is not to be ignored - obviously I agree with the rest of what you've written – as to your point about me being too politically correct. That’s probably fair, but as Neil Young said when someone told him he was off key – ‘that’s my style’ – occasionally, I’m not adverse to taking off the gloves – as you know – just like to pick my targets and the rest of the time slide quietly in and out.
- onward and upward.

At the end of his post Allan asked:

Or have we joined America's war in drugs?

Good question, and if we have joined America's war on drugs, we're having just as much of a failure as them. I'm no fan of the Taliban, fundamentalists are a waste of space whether Muslim or Xtian as far as I'm concerned - supertitious whackos.

But the Taliban were opposed to drugs as much as they were/are to women's rights. Since the Taliban got run out the poppy crop has been setting production records annually and unlike in the past the Afghanis aren't shipping out the opium to Europe and elsewhere for further processing. Nope, they are moving more and more into value added and turning the opium into Heroin in country. The end result of all this is more and better Heroin available in the West at lower prices.

I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA is in on the shipping end of moving the heroin to market, as they have mucho experience in drug trafficing with an uncanny ability to evade US Customs, I guess it's a matter of National Security - the new buzz word for NONE OF YOUR BUISNESS!

However one terms it - political correctness, toeing the party line, parroting the mainstream media - G West has presented an extraordinarily coherent and concise case supporting the real conspiracy theory. This is the story involving a tall bearded dude in a cave in Afghanistan directing 19 Arab jihadists to take flying lessons, buy box knives, and simultaneously take over 4 commercial aircraft and fly them into buildings. At near stall speed. Having thwarted security. The subsequent collapses of the twin towers were also perfectly symetrical and at near-free fall velocities. The airliner which punctured the pentagon evaporated into thin air, surveillance video from a nearby gas staion has disappeared, air traffic controller conversations are non-existent, black boxes were never recovered, wreckage at ground zero was heavily guarded and removed without scrutiny.

Please. Anyone who contends that these are the real truths around the events of Sept 11 2001 is either severely hoodwinked or has an agenda. Furthermore, the same gang of thugs (Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld) have been shown to be consumate liars whenever they open their mouths; why would any rational person blithely accept their accounts? Personally, I would sooner sport a tin foil hat than swallow their hornswoggle.

TommyMoore (I used to use a tommy moore block to set up spars), anyway, maybe we can make tin foil hats fashionable. You last sentence was a good way to put it!

Amen, tommymoore.

Thank you Tommy Moore, I will wear my tin foil hat proudly. I'm so tired of Coincidence Theorists.

If there are any doubts about the US bombing and invasion of Afghanistan being ilegal,see: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan-Criminal-Tribunal10mar04.htm

Canadian participation could therefore be viewed as being accomplices after the fact.

On the subject of conspiracies. Well, they happen.

Governments, corporations, crooks, high school students... everybody does it. If me and 2 or 3 Tyee folks were to sit in a pub I'm sure we'd conspire a bit too.

It is hard to believe that people would let their own citizens be done in, no question. But then as we know, even guys like Churchill weren't above letting Coventry get hit because he had a bigger picture in mind.

If you're a true-believer, the loss of a few fellow citizens could be seen as a regrettable but necessary sacrifice to further some other goal.

One thing I am sure about though is that the official version released shortly after an event is probably wrong.

Every year to this day new books are written about Napoleonic history, or the history of either of the world wars etc. They're not reprints. They bring to light new evidence which challenges existing knowledge.

Why would James Arnold release a new two-volume history of Napoleon's campaign on the Danube in 1809? Why have there been literally more than a hundred other histories on it?

Doesn't everyone believe the official version written by Napoleon himself in his bulletins immediately after it took place? Is Arnold a conspiracy theorist for suggesting Napoleon fudged his numbers and may have tried to portray himself in a better light?

Does anyone today still believe the official British history that we took 20,000+ casualties at Ypres ("wipers" to Canucks) due to the evil Germans using poison gas? Of course not. People really do tell lies.

Either way, no one's going to get the answers to all their 9/11 questions for decades or perhaps even longer.

And when somebody from the University of Whereever produces the best history of the thing in the year 2200 no one will care and it might sell 500 copies to libraries.

And sure it would be a nicer world if conspiracies never happened and the official version was always the truth but then there wouldn't be a History Book Club and that would be a shame.

All:
I saw the loose change video discussed here more than a month ago. I could not stop watching it. The really striking thing about it is its use of primary material and extremely skillful editing. This movie is either the most awesomely distorted conspiracy propaganda or the most powerful documentary I've ever watched. I lack the technical know-how to evaluate many of the issues raised. I did go down to watch the demolition of the Georgia Medical-Dental Building years ago, and it's collapse was superficially very similar to that of the World Trade Towers..

I see there has been much discussion on the merits (or lack of), but I wonder how many have actually viewed the video on-line? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5137581991288263801&q=loose+change

I'd really like to hear the video taken apart. The evidence, on it's face, seems extremely plausible, but the message, if even remotely true, would point to the most heinous conspiracy ever carried out. If false, it is the worst, most exploitative trash I can think of. Frankly, I don't know what to think. Warning, the film is 1 hr 21 minutes long. Get a six pack....

'Frankly, I don't know what to think.' if you're considering that it may be true then you don't know how to think.

Nana
Thanks for the link by the Citizen soldier, certainly one of the more rational sites I have seen on the subject and it does jive roughly with the 10% figure of total weight I gave earlier. Now you are posting links that claim over 3,000 tons of DU in Iraq, when the previous link you provided states 320 tons, a figure far more believable.

In any event, it pales to the untold amount of damage done by Saddam when he ignited the oil fields, and withheld food and medicine from his people in order to keep in power. Not to mention the damage that the stress of living in a dictatorship does to people. Saddam sent people to the meat grinder, both figuratively and for real.

Allan to answer your question

From: http://www.canada-afghanistan.gc.ca/background-en.asp#2

Canada-Afghanistan Relations
Early Relations
For many years Canada's principal focus in Afghanistan was providing humanitarian and development assistance both bilaterally and multilaterally—through the United Nations, the World Bank, NGOs and other partners—in response to civil war and a series of natural disasters.
Diplomatic relations with Afghanistan were established in 1968 to facilitate these efforts but were severed following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Diplomatic relations were not re-established with any of the regimes that held power following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 until the appointment in January 2002 of the Interim Administration of President Hamid Karzai.
Post-September 11
Canada expanded its scope of activities in Afghanistan shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Following condemnation of the terror attacks by the UN Security Council, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien announced that Canada would contribute air, land and sea forces to the international campaign against terrorism. Since October 2001, Canada has contributed up to six warships to the coalition fleet in the Arabian Gulf-Arabian Sea area in support of Canadian Forces' Operation Apollo. Part of their mandate has been to conduct maritime interdiction operations with allied vessels, preventing al-Qaeda and Taliban members from escaping the area in merchant ships and fishing boats. Canadian military aircraft, including helicopters, airlift and long-range patrol aircraft have also contributed significantly to Operation Apollo, both inside and outside Afghanistan.
In February 2002, a contingent of 850 Canadian soldiers was deployed to Kandahar for six months as part of Operation Apollo. Integrated into the U.S. Army task force, the 3rd Battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group took part in offensive operations against the Taliban regime which had been aiding and harbouring terrorist groups. The Battle Group was supported by a squadron of Coyote armoured reconnaissance vehicles and combat support elements.

Truman
I agree that it was defiantly on before the US arrived in Vietnam, but having just finished the book by the leader of the Communist party of Malaysia who was in Peking for a good part of the war, the domino affect was a real strategy of the Chinese.

Thomas
The US did win the battle, but they lost the strategic portion of the war. Even the North Vietnamese Generals who were recently interviewed stated that they had expended everything they had on the Tet Offensive, had the US realized that fact they could have smashed them within weeks. Instead the US public lost confidence and the US had to go to the peace table, South Vietnam only fell AFTER the US military left and the North broke the Peace treaty, which was always a sham. The North Vietnamese get credit for being very good gamblers.

Murdock
The definition actually remains valid, but I agree that the Media along with the Liberals abused to the point where the Canadian Public generally have no idea what it means, in fact the mission that is pulling out of the Golan last week is a “true peacekeeping mission”

Thomas
I have just read that cases of “gulf war syndrome” were detected in soldiers that never served there. The author suggests that the more likely cause is the vaccines being used.

Good one Elliot. So does that mean you watched the video?

tommymoore
tommy, I don't think that's (your post above) entirely accurate...about what I've said. In fact, the implication from Epstein's analysis (which I’d generally support) is that there are lots of errors and omissions in the official account and plenty of questions, as Frank says, that'll continue to be asked for decades. And, I wouldn't want anyone to think of me as apologist for any of the Bush clan.

So, after receiving your well-aimed, but back-handed compliment, I took a bit of time to actually read once more most of what's been posted here on the subject - as well as to look again at the supporting material. I do have to say that cut and paste is working pretty well as a resource for those of you who may not have thought out your own conclusions that thoroughly.

No real problem with that, but seeing the exact words cribbed from New York Magazine article pop up again and again in your several arguments and postings doesn't exactly convince me that you've all come to these conclusions rationally, dispassionately and on your own. Perhaps that’s just me, but, as I said, no real problem.

One small thing should be remembered though: The collapse of WTC 1 & 2 occurred in such a way that the enormous quantities of material of which the buildings were made, the debris, in other words, actually ended up, post collapse, in the hollow ‘bathtub’ contained by the slurry wall which kept water out of the (I believe it was seven stories deep in some places) basement area (mostly hollow) of the site. For more information about the process of cleaning up that underground mountain of debris anyone interested in learning more could start with William Langewiesche’s 3 part series: American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center" which appeared in three successive issues of Atlantic Monthly starting with the August/September 2002 magazine. Edith Iglauer also wrote, at the time the WTC was built, an account of the construction of this slurry wall foundation arrangement for the New Yorker. I don’t know if it was republished on the New Yorker website at the time of 9/11 but it may have been.

Anyway, I clearly don’t have all the answers about the collapse, but, in the end I think it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to say that the first two examples of the destructive collapse of buildings of that scale and magnitude would probably set some interesting precedents no matter how caused. Several commentators seem convinced that a 14-minute video presentation by a civil engineering expert with a few photo clips is enough evidence to support what even the most credulous witness must admit is a pretty ‘interesting’ explanation. I, for one, am not convinced and I think you always have to keep in mind that congruity doesn’t necessarily imply causality.

Still, I'll keep my own counsel and keep reading and listening: There's not much I wouldn't believe about the complicity of the current gang in the White House and I have no confidence whatever in their affection for truth and openness. However, every time I start to think that all this stuff good people like you believe in so passionately might be true I remember just how incompetently they handled the Niger yellow cake forgeries, the David Kelly mess in England, Colin Powell's little staged drama at the UN and, of course the WMD nonappearance. Surely a group of diabolical masterminds capable of creating this nightmare in the heart of New York City would have been sufficiently skilful and devious to produce at least one hidden cache of terror weapons somewhere in the desert wastes of Iraq.

When I think about how poorly the turkeys handled those little projects I just can't accept the proposition that they could engineer a plan of the depth, complexity and utter moral bankruptcy of the conspiracy you're proposing without it having leaked (poured would be better) before now. If that means I have to don a tinfoil chapeau, so be it.

As for knowing how to think, I'm willing to take lessons. On key precept I've picked up is to resist forming a conclusion with incomplete information. When something like spare change comes along, one should start with a healthy dose of skepticism. I lack first hand knowledge of the details covered in the documentary.

Usually, there is a preponderance of evidence available to assist in determining fact. In the case of the spare change video, there hasn't been much attention paid to it. The arguments of the creator are completely out there, but the material is laid out very painstakingly. It would seem that it would be easy to demolish the chain of logic if there were factual errors. I just haven't encountered an authoritative debunking.

Well, G, these guys were smart enough to get the whole country cheering them on (even most democrats) to get their kids slaughtered in Iraq to accomplish nothing but their weird secret agenda. I guess they were smart enough to drop a few buildings in a controlled demolition.

And I wouldn't doubt if they CONSIDERED stashing some fake WMDs in the desert but understood that the price to pay for being caught were very high indeed. The credibility of the American government would be completely destroyed.

Elliot, you charmer you.
Every time I see one of you sweet little notes I image you saying it in the voice of one of those little munchkins in South Park.

T.Cahill I watched "Loose Change" for only the second time after yoo recommended it. My only critiscim is that the plane slamming into the Pentagon shot was a recreation and they didn't indicate that. Other than that it was all taken from newspapers, magazines, live interviews and network broadcasts. I'm in interesting company...with Dan Rather and Peter Jenning ...who could recognize a controlled demolition when they saw one.

What struck me this time around, is the complicity of media management in keeping a lid on this for so long...considering their own reports that day.

G.West You do amaze me so. Epstein is a shill. His burning questions have all been answered.
His view on Oswald being the Perp instead of the Patsie no long hold up with the release of the information in the last few years about Oswald being in ONI...Naval Intelligence.

I do lots of cut and pasteing because it's more efficient and I give the sources. You sound like this is supposed to be a creative writing class.

There is a mountain of evidence for the case that 9/11 was an inside job and basic physics supports it. Nobody breaks the Laws of Phsics...it's impossible. Digest that first, then maybe you can start getting a handle on the rest.

And the Neocons outsmarted themselves, they made the mistake of thinking we are all sheeple.

G., they did a poll and they found out that only two people in North America thought Oswald acted alone--you and Epstein.

I've refered above to "spare change", which as most probably know, is the magazine printed to be re-sold be homeless people. I really meant "Loose Change". Sorry for the mixup.

Just some very quick points:
1. The plane that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945 couldn't have been a B-52; you figure out why.
2. The call trancripts from the planes that crashed into WTC were clearly made on airphones, not cell phones...in fact that's what the narration says. Calls from the Ted Olsen's wife were said to be on a cell phone, but that would be at a lower altitude and not inconsistent with what the film alleges would be possible.
3. Suggesting that Marvin Bush, whose association with the security firm ended in 2000; and, as a former director of another company means exactly nothing.
4. If some fancy dan switching took place, and the supposedly dead people on the planes aren't dead, where are they? I reckon a bunch of those missing billions in gold would have had to go to them in order to keep them quiet, eh?
5. What does the destruction of reinforced concrete buildings and empty tanks have to do with providing information and analysis for the collapse of steel-framed buildings?
6. I'm no expert in controlled demoltion, but I believe one of the pinciples that's frequently used in order to maintain the integrity of the debris is a series of cables connecting severed or partially-severed structural components prior to demolition. These installations and preparations are intrusive and take time and space to install. In other words I suspect they're not invisible. Before I'd believe what the film alledges I'd have to hear what a demolition expert has to say.
7. Much of what the film says about the justification for the exercise is totally hypothetical and has no basis in fact.
8. If these guys are so smart, why haven't they picked up the profits on their put options - is it possible the investor who was playing the market died in the collapse? I'm pulling your leg here - just to point out how easy it is to make many of the kinds of allegations the film does.
9. Truman, I'd like to see that poll. My guess is that it was done by the same outfit offering a 10,000 reward for anyone who reads Lowry and Atwood in the same lifetime - you're pulling my leg now!
10. There's lots more. The Bushies and the neocons are dangerous idiots, underline idiots - they are not diabolically clever homicidal monsters.
11.If all this is true and Al Qaeda is nothing more than a benevolent society, then who blew a hole in the Cole? - among other things - is Tony Blair in on the scam? Prime Minister Howard of Australia? Silvio Berlusconi (of him I might have some doubt)?
12.There's lots more holes in the theories, I just don't have the time - it's not worth the effort - call me back when you've got a real case.
13. As for Epstein, if you prefer to follow Oliver Stone, by all means go for it.
Cheers.

Oh, and nana, I wasn't actually referring to your posts. You do attribute very responsibly.
Just one other quick point. Take out the media clips from Sept 11 and their frequent use of the term explosion(s); remove the hypothetical stuff and there's really not much left - other than Jeff King or whatever his name is, is there?

As I said very clearly there are lots of questions. The New York Times, by the end of the week of the attacks, had already pointed out the problems with identifying the hijackers and subsequent developments have just reinforced this. Much of the rest of the film was completely out of context. There is so much that can be hung on this administration it seems a shame to me to spend so much time on this hypothetical stuff.

Well, I knew I could count on finding a healthy dose of skepticism here at theTyee.ca.

tcahill
Thanks for that - glad you find it healthy! Was beginning to think I was alone here - the 'silence was deafening'. On this subject one's never sure if that's just the calm before the storm.

GWest:
Thanks for demolishing that pernicious meme. As you alluded to above, it isn't as though you have an interest in defending the White House.

tcahill
Doubt if it's demolished! I'm sure they're marshalling their forces for another assault. God I hate defending George Bush.
Cheers.

Jeez...the EXPLOSIONS ARE PART OF THE PROOF IT WAS A CONTROLLED DEMOLITION. THEY ARE NOT TRIVIA. Witness after witness talks about explosions...and you dismiss this? Lamont Geological Laboratory's seismograph recorded quakes BEFORE the fall of each building and none during. William Rodriques testimony as to the sub-basement explosions cannot be dismissed.
"Take out the media clips".....again THEY ARE THE POINT! That's more eyewitness testimony that got glossed over in subsequent days.

It is a constant source of amazment to me how dense supposedly bright people can be when they don't want to face facts.

The calls were supposedly
MADE ON CELL PHONES...
http://physics911.ca/org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6

The whole Barbara Olsen episode was especially interesting since the Olsens were divorcing.

Ted said "It is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations ... where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out." in his role of Solicitor General before the supreme Court.

It would seem that 200 passengers wound up in Cleveland. I do not suppose any of them survived .

Frankly, I think your cables are a red herring.

nana
If you want to suggest the repeated and repeated testimony of a bunch of reporters running around like idiots on 9/11 is any kind of evidence of much beyond their state of mind that day then I hope you never find yourself in a court of law.

I didn't say that anything you've claimed was impossible, I simply said the case hasn't been made. As for the cables, who knows if my observations have any validity. If one knows anything about controlled demolition then IMO they are more relevant to the discussion ( especially given the fact that the filmmakers don't interview a single demolition expert) than the point that Marvin Bush was once a director of a particular security company or had been associated a specific insurance company a year or so before 9/11 - if you want to talk about red herrings.

So you're now suggesting that the 'Bush Crime Family' murdered 200 passengers in cold blood in Cleveland! This gets strange and stranger. William Rodriges is a janitor, a fine fellow, but a janitor. Pardon me if I don't accept his testimony as expert evidence. If the film is all you've got, it's not much.

Look, I'm not trying to put you or your enthusiasm down. Have I been anything but polite?

I just don't think the case is there. I think you can hang all sorts of lies and obfuscations on this White House and I think in the end it will go down as one of the worst administrations in the US since Warren Harding - but not for the WTC unless someone can come up with something a lot more substantial than what you've shown me.
Sorry, but there you go. No hard feelings.

By the way, the plane was a B 25....that hit the Empire State Building. B52s - they didn't exist in 1945.

G. West said:

G, that's what I and probably nana and others are saying about the official story. But actually I would pretty much claim that the official story IS IMPOSSIBLE. I don't know exactly what happened, but one has to wear blinders and cover their ears to buy the official story.

G. West said:

G, that's what I and probably nana and others are saying about the official story. But actually I would pretty much claim that the official story IS IMPOSSIBLE. I don't know exactly what happened, but one has to wear blinders and cover their ears to buy the official story.

Once one realizes something is fishy then a good direction to look is to try and answer the question - Who Benefits? Right after you determine who might benefit then ask yourself, who that might benefit was in positions to affect the outcome - like order air defense to stand down, order the FBI to collect and disappear video evidence to mention only two aspects. I'll give you a clue, it wasn't a seven foot Arab tucked in a cave with a dialysis machine.

And just as an aside, what was Mr. Atta doing on Jack "the indicted Rethuglican lobbyist - actually beyond indictment - he has pled guilty" Abramoff's boat just before 9-11?

g west,i do not know why you keep going back to reiterate your position.from what i can see you have established DOUBT and that is the all important word here.
doubt,raises questions that none here can answer by themselves,which has been shown,because none are trained in the kind of technical aspects being looked at.
have we a fire inspector to tell us explosions are common in fires(next time you are around a campfire throw in some wet wood)and the plastics and chemicals used in our everyday lives creates such a toxic environment people would do anything to escape.(like jumping out of skyscrapers)

as you pointed out,we all wonder what went on,but we do not have all the facts and even if we did,SOMEONE WOULD RAISE DOUBT.

and when that happens you can never close the case(incident)JUST LOOK AT THE LOCKERBY INCIDENT

late for work,see you guyz in the funny pages !

Sorry for the semi-double post, musta accidentally hit a key, or maybe it was my cat that keeps trying to type.

Perhaps the presence of Mr. Atta, the alleged ringleader of the hi-jackers being on Abramoff's boat is just another coincidence, like the fact that the bin Ladens and Bushes being practically in-laws.

Colin, thanks for the explanation in italics, but a brief history of our involvement neither represents a declaration of war nor the rational for attacking citizens of a foriegn country.

If it's as simple as "fighting terrorism", I'd suggest we shut our borders to the US promptly because any likely danger to this country comes, as it always has, from south of the border.

And while the US prefers to label their players "freedom fighters", their mission is to strike terror into the hearts of anyone opposed to American backed regimes with just as much deadly force as any Taliban with a rusty rifle.

Now I appreciate the US admin. doesn't like the Taliban.

I don't particularly like people who go about blowing up 4,000 year old artifacts or treat half the population as less than the other, but then I have a real hate on for people who take genuine pleasure from the torture of people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Besides, even here in the oh, so democratic
west a good many people are treated as far less valued than the rest.

I note that certain groups in Canada are now fighting the good fight to keep certain books out of school libaries in Canada so that our children won't be traumatized by the in humanities of the half-century-old Israeli-Palestine conflict. Thank god kids never read newspaper headlines either.

It makes me wonder if perhaps our adult population will not soon start being spared some of the subtleties of the even larger mid-east mess as well.

Words are such wonderful tools, aren't they?
I feel I must thank Orwell for ensuring I can live out the remainder of my life in absolute ironic bliss.

And if things get really depressing I can always thank the Yanks and now my own fellow Canadian "peacemakers" for keeping those supply routes open for the poppy harvesters.

nana; did you know that prime minister borden orchestrated the halifax explosion?

Allan
I thought you were looking for a timeline, not an explanation? It was cut and pasted from the site.

Oh Elliot, you're such a clever little dickens.

G.West To dismiss the testimony of a man who worked at WTC for 25 years, and who would therefore have intimate knowledge of the buildings on the grounds that he's just a janitor betrays just a bit of class bias and snobbery. The point is he was an expert eyewitness to explosions from the sub-basements and helped a man out who'd been injured in the first blast...which took place before the plane hit. He then went back in and help firemen by opening stairwell doors and helped get more people out.

You want credentials? I keep trying to get you to look at Prof. Jones paper on why it was a CONTROLLED DEMOLITION. Here's the link..give it a try.
http://www.9eleven.info/911JonesPaperhtm7.htm

Don't get all sqeemish on us about 2oo people being murdered in cold blood when far more than that have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are dealing with psychos in charge...people with no capacity for empathy...whose motivation is power, control and greed...and who LIKE the very idea of torture. Why would they balk at disappearing two hundred who supposedly died in plane crashes anyway? It does give strength to the idea that whatever hit the Pentagon and the towers were not passenger planes.

and chretien arranged the quebec ice storm to win over separatists.

The facade is showing another crack. http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/13760721.htm

Nana
perhaps you missed my post, you have provided me with a link saying 320 tons of DU and now you are posting the amount is 1,000-3,000 tons, so which site information is true?

and it was trudeau who perpetrated the flq/october crisis because he knew if he declared martial law the electorate would realize he wasn't just another panty-waisted liberal who wore sandals.

Wow, eliot the idiot's comments really advance the discussion, doesn't everyone agree?

The 320 ton figure is a Pentagon estimate of DU used in only the first Gulf War. The second figure is the total as of March 23, 2006.

Re-read:
http://www.countercurrents.org/hall230306.htm

Nana
I already read Jones' paper. It's interesting but hardly the testimony of a demolition expert.

Physical phenomena are complicated and explaining them is never straightforward, despite what the folks with the calculators tell you.

You find somebody from a reputable demolition firm who can describe the sequentia of preparing two (no you actually claim it's three, don't you?)enormous buildings for controlled demolition without removing cladding, floor coverings and the like and without exposing significant portions of structural steel and attaching the necessary charges, not to mention the blasting caps and coordinating wiring while the buildings are in continuous occupation (even assuming the exceptions noted in the material) without any of the people whose offices are in those buildings noticing and starting to ask questions and we'll talk again.

It is an enormous job in a building when there are no occupants, no furniture and no fixtures; when services like electricity, alarm systems, fire sprinklers and electronic communications have all been removed. It would require a large team of experienced workers at least several weeks to prepare one building and it would be fatally disruptive to the activities that were going on in the offices at the same time: jackhammers, welding torches, power tools – dust and debris. Ask someone who’s worked on preparing a building to collapse – say someone who was involved in knocking down the Kingdome in Seattle. And yet you want your readers to believe that this was done not once, not twice, but three times in a few weeks prior to 9/11 (the assumption in all your speculation seems to point to Larry Silverstein’s complicity in this diabolical plot) so you haven’t got much time either if that’s your hypothesis.

In my opinion, your observations and testimony are asking me to interpret what I know objectively about the collapse (very little apart from what I see with my own eyes and the evidence I’m aware of about the physical structures themselves) in a way which supposes a chain of events and a sophisticated conspiracy which is more far-fetched, in my opinion than the conventional explanation.

As I’ve said, there are many things we don’t know about the circumstances of the buildings’ attack and collapse; who did it, how and why – postulating the case you and the conspiracy theorists have doesn’t, in my opinion, help very much in the real quest to answer admittedly difficult questions.

In the meantime, I've got work to do so this conversation, as far as I'm concerned, is over.
No hard feelings,
Cheers.

G.West You make the assumption that the wiring for the CD was done only a few weeks prior to 9/11. The significance of Marvin Bush being on board the management of the security company, is that it provided the opportunity to do the job over a long period of time.

So you dismiss eye witness accounts, you dismiss the finding of a physicist with expertise in metallurgy...I think you must be waiting for signed confessions from those involved.

You're the "conspiracy theorist". I'm pointing out evidence that shows the official conspiracy theory is poppycock.

nana
Was just on my way out the door and saw your 'kind' message. That's definitely the way to advance your cause, by the way, start imagining even more imponderables to create an even longer string of unlikely probability the potential believer has to accept.

If you can't come to grips with what I've written, often, clearly, and politely, then, as I said above - until you can show me that what you've suggested isn't preposterous (given my clearly articulated reservations) I'm not prepared to argue with you. In fact, I may well have been better not to try in the first place since it appears you're more interested in slanging me than confronting the implications of my ideas.
As I said, that's it, good bye. Others can judge the result for themselves.

Collin take a look at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6143.htm

DU contamination lasts 2 Billion years. Nothing can justify its use.

nana sure is smart. she helped to discover that lester pearson choreagraphed the suez canal crisis so he could win the nobel peace prize.

Marvin Bush involvement with Securacom represents opportunity. You questioned the amount of time it would take to prepare the buildings for CD...and I pointed out that there may have been no need to rush the job.

We are in agreement that the incidents of 9/11 were as a result of a conspiracy that was a long time planning.

You persist in believing the "Official Conspiracy Theory" of a man on kidney dialysis directing the events from a cave far away.

My conspiracy theory says that people on the ground and in positions of power were far more able to direct the events of 9/11 than the above mentioned invalid. The evidence supports my views better than it does yours.

That is hardly insulting. It is just sad that you continue to support the unsupportable.

I

rkewen; you're calling me an idiot while you're reading this crap? get a brain. this is horseshite.