Archive for the ‘war on 'terror'’ Category
I love summaries of why 9/11 conspiracy theories are well… insane
Cheney: We bomb the World Trade Center.Kristol: Perfect! And blame it on Saddam!
Cheney: No, we bomb the World Trade Center and blame it on Osama bin Laden.
Feith: Oh. How?
Cheney: Easy. First, we cultivate 19 suicidal Muslim patsies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, I’d say mostly from Saudi Arabia. We bring them to the U.S., train them at U.S. flight schools. They should be high-profile terrorist suspects who are magically given free reign by the security agencies to travel back and forth to various terrorist training camps to study passenger jet piloting. Actually that process is already underway now. Our friends in the Clinton administration are seeing to it that four groups of Arab men are being brought along by the FBI and the CIA.
Wolfowitz: How is it that the Clinton administration is already helping us with this, when we haven’t even planned this yet?
Cheney: They just are. Okay?
Wolfowitz: Okay, fine. And what do we do with these hijackers?
Cheney: We sit idly by while they plot to hijack a series of passenger jet planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House.
Wolfowitz: And how do we get them to do that?
Cheney: We just do. You see, we worked with these people back in the old mujahadeen days in Afghanistan. So naturally we’re still thick as thieves with them.
Feith: Oh, of course. So we get them to fly into these buildings. And the impact from the planes will bring down the World Trade Center.
Cheney: No, Doug, dammit, you’re not following me. The impact from the planes most certainly won’t be sufficient to knock down the Towers. We know this because we’ve privately conducted studies which show that the Towers will easily be able to withstand impact by two jets loaded to the gills with jet fuel. That said, the jets will likely cause skyscraper fires hot enough to kill everyone above the point of impact; we’re going to have to assume, of course, that the exits from the higher floors to the lower floors will be mostly blocked after the collisions. So assuming we crash the planes about two-thirds of the way up each of the towers early on a business day, we’re looking at trapping and killing a good three, four, maybe even five thousand people on the upper floors.
Feith: Fantastic. I love killing people in the finance industry. It’s too bad the people on the lower floors will get to escape.
Cheney: It is too bad — especially since we’re going to blow up the rest of the building complex anyway.
Feith: We are?
Cheney: Yes. You see, the way I see it, our best course of action is to first crash planes into each the towers, trapping and killing those thousands on the upper floors of each building. After the impact, of course, the people on the lower floors will find their way out of the building and on to the street, where they will achieve relative safety — at which point we’ll finally detonate the massive network of explosive charges we’ve secretly hidden in the buildings in the weeks and months prior to the attacks.
Feith: Wait, why did we do that again?
Cheney: Because the buildings wouldn’t have fallen down unless we did.
Wolfowitz: But why do we need the buildings to fall down?
Cheney: Because the events of the day will be insufficiently horrifying and impactful without the building collapses.
Feith: So why don’t we detonate the charges earlier, so that we can kill the people on the lower floors, too?
Cheney: That’s a good question. At some point we have to sacrifice effect for believability. You see, if the planes crash into the buildings and the buildings immediately collapse, everyone will be suspicious and they’ll immediately be onto the presence of the explosives. So what we have to do is let the planes crash into the building, give the jet fuel time to start fires that will “soften” the building core, and then we detonate the charges. Afterwards, we’ll be able to argue that the fires coupled with the impact actually caused the buildings to collapse.
Feith: Why will we be able to argue that? Didn’t our studies show that impact and fire alone wouldn’t have caused the buildings to collapse?
Cheney: Those were our secret, far-more-advanced studies, done with secret, far-more-advanced military technology. The vast majority of the world’s civilian structural engineers, however, can be counted on after the incident to conclude that the buildings collapsed due to a combination of fire, impact, and the knocking off of fireproofing from the building beams.
Feith: Why can they be counted on to conclude that?
Cheney: Because that’s what our secret research shows their not-secret research will show! Jesus Christ, work with me on this, will you?
Wolfowitz: I think I get it. We crash the planes, kill everyone above the impact of the planes, let the people underneath the impact out to safety, then collapse the buildings about an hour or so later using the explosives that we pointlessly incurred months and weeks worth of career- and life-threatening risk to covertly plant in a building complex visited by hundreds of thousands of people every week.
Cheney: Exactly! The actual deaths will mostly be caused by the planes. But we’ll incur the massive additional risk simply to destroy the building, for effect, because it will look cool and scary on television.
The rest of it is a bit long but has some other sarcastic gems.
Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?
I love the title of this movie, from the director of ‘Super Size Me’.. Watching this is certainly better than trying to study for my exam tomorrow, for which I don’t know what to do as my lecturer is the worst I’ve managed to have in the three years of my college career. Anyway, enjoy the clips & I love that the trailer has Gogol Bordello’s ‘Wanderlust King’ as the soundtrack:
Stephen Colbert at the White House dinner
I remember this video as being one of the first times I was ever exposed to politics in a meaningful sense. While its probably an odd thing to say, this was one of the first times that politics became ‘real’ for me and remains one of the best ‘take-downs’ of the Bush Administration I have seen. What’s impressive (and kind of horrifying) is that a large number of the comments made by Colbert still apply…
Man, I really want to see Mike Gravel as U.S. President
This video is absolutely insane but is quite entertaining - love the ‘military-industrial complex’ speech bit at the end too.. It seems to be quite legit given that Gravel has it on his webpage:
Fitna (English Language version)
Ideologically rather corrupt and shallow, this film doesn’t really make much of a point beyond ‘extremists are bad’ which one would imagine is rather self-apparent. While it has some impact, mainly through using footage from some real-life executions, any person with a brain should be able to see through the blatant racism and short-sightedness of Geert Wilder’s film. There’s an intersting article about it on the BBC here and it certainly shows what the BBC is talking about in terms of his ability to generate interest - as I write this, the film has been seen 410,211 times on the host website alone. And that doesn’t take into account other language variations.
Just to be clear, I’m posting this out of interest in the topic and the controversy it has generated. Not out of any belief in Mr.Wilder’s ideas. I’m also doing this because I think that silencing talk becuase religious extremists don’t like the content of a video is a bad thing and should be opposed on principle if nothing else.
‘The Word’ on Obama’s ‘Race Speech’
Cian’s already talked about this, but Obama does it funnier (sorry Cian) (Also, I apologise for the fact that ‘funnier’ isn’t correct English)
The Most Important Issue in the U.S. Elections? Bullshit!
It’s kind of creepy the way that ‘fake’ news like The Daily Show, the Onion and the Colbert Report are actually more realistic than most of the ‘real’ coverage of this election:
Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters
Are the Iranians the real winners of the Iraq war?
Interesting article here and while I’m not sure that it’s all completely accurate, it does strike me as being somewhat likely:
After the 2003 US invasion, amid the chaos and looting that followed the collapse of Saddam’s regime, SCIRI and Badr forces flooded across the Iranian border into Iraq. “Border control was nonexistent,” says Wayne White, who in 2003 headed the Iraq team at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “The Iranians could just drive across…. They would come in convoys, ten trucks at a time.” Ali Allawi, a postwar Iraqi defense minister and author of The Occupation of Iraq, wrote, “About 10,000 trained and disciplined Badr fighters entered Iraq, either unarmed or armed only with light weapons, and reassembled in various towns and cities as the fighting arm of SCIRI.” (Other estimates involve significantly higher numbers.) Lavishly financed by Iran, SCIRI and Badr installed their leaders within days in ad hoc posts in Baquba, Kut and other key junctions in the south. Wary of Iran, but seeing little alternative to the turban-wearing clerics of SCIRI and Badr, US and British occupation authorities put the party’s officials into top positions. From the early, US-selected Iraqi Governing Council in 2003 onward, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim was named to a succession of key leadership posts, and top SCIRI officials were installed in various ministries, the police and the army. In the Shiite-dominated south SCIRI officials were named to run provincial authorities, cities and towns. They were viewed by the United States and Britain as natural allies in the struggle against remnants of the Baath Party and the burgeoning Sunni resistance — precisely the forces that Iran, too, saw as its deadliest foes.
Virtually en masse, Badr officers were recruited to the fledgling Iraqi police and army that were being assembled by the United States. According to Raed Jarrar, the Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, Badr officers maintained their same ranks when they were inducted into the Iraqi security forces. A particularly nasty part of Badr’s work in Iraq from 2003 to the present has been the operation of death squads. Often, such units were run directly by Iraq’s Interior Ministry, whose Badr-controlled police were blamed for assassinating hundreds of former government officials, ex-military and intelligence officers, and civilian professionals, according to widespread media reports. “I was told in the summer of 2003 in Tehran that the change in regime in Baghdad had allowed Iranian intelligence to identify every single individual who had worked in the Iran section of the Iraqi intelligence service,” says Mahan Abedin, director of research at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism in London. “They were able to get as much detail as possible about their person, their movement, their connections, their mobile number. All that information was collected.” They were eradicated, Abedin says, in a “hidden war.”
Just some quick thoughts on the BBC interview with George W. Bush
It’s a pretty good interview and you can see the whole thing here.
Just a few things that I found interesting -Bush has a very utilitarian ‘end’s justify the means’ view of a lot of his policies. It just comes across in a lot of the things he says and the language he uses, especially relating to Iraq but also to Africa. There’s also the oddest echoes of Jimmy Carter in terms of how he talks about the ‘higher realism of helping Africa’ in the sense that securing African well-being safeguards America’s national interest. What’s also interesting to see is how surprisingly affable Bush is. Nearly too much at times such as when he off-handedly refers to the ‘Dali Lama crowd’ & uses the word ’suicider’ which is just .. awkward. Anyway, I still think he’s a horrible excuse for a President but it’s worth a look.