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Greetings, and welcome to the World Affairs Board! The World Affairs Board is one of the premier forums for the discussion of the pressing geopolitical issues of our time. Topics include foreign & defense policy, international security, military developments, weapons proliferation, terrorism, international strategic affairs, and politics. Our membership includes many from military, defense industry, and government backgrounds with expert knowledge on a wide range of topics. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so why not register a World Affairs Board account and join our community today? |
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#1 (permalink) |
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Contributor
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Lefty mentality
Self-Loathing and the Denial of Terrorism
BY JAMES LILEKS c.2006 Newhouse News Service \ More stories by James Lileks You're an enlightened world citizen. Your T-shirt says "9/11 was an inside job." You're pretty sure we're living in a fascist state, that President Bush taps the Dixie Chicks' phones, Christian abortion clinic bombers outnumber jihadis, and the war on "terror" is a distraction from the real threats: carbon emissions and Pat Robertson. Then you learn that 17 people were arrested in a terrorist bomb plot. How do you process the information? Let's take it step by step. Gosh, that's horrible, you think. But no -- that's what they WANT you to feel. Recall the prime directive: Question Authority (unless he's a college professor). The plotters must have been impoverished olive farmers radicalized by the removal of Saddam Hussein. Why, if someone came in and toppled your president, you'd go to their country and ... well, you'd thank them. Unless they did it for the wrong reasons! Then you'd blow something up. Like an SUV dealership. At night. Anyway, you understand; you care a lot about Iraqis these days. You think about Iraq more than China, to be honest, but it's not as if you'll scrape off your "Free Tibet" bumper sticker -- unless it's to make room for "Free Darfur." Or "Hands Off Darfur," depending. Wait a minute: The "terrorists" were Canadian? You can understand someone blowing up trains in Spain and London. They sent troops to an illegal war cooked up by neocons who want to kill brown people for Exxon and Jesus, or something. You can understand, reluctantly, blowing up teens in an Israeli pizza parlor, because the Jews took the West Bank from the sovereign, ancient nation of Palestine. (How can a liberal socialist country behave so poorly? The world is full of mysteries.) But Canada? Isn't Michael Moore from Canada? You can get medical marijuana from married gay doctors in Canada, and no one has guns. You console yourself: Maybe they were really planning to attack the U.S. You realize the suspects were all Muslim, and you dread the inevitable pogroms. Haven't been any yet, but any day now. You read that a mosque was vandalized in Toronto after the arrest, and you feel a certain grim relief. Finally, racism! Banners. If you're going to have a march, you'll need banners. But wait. You read that the suspects were not connected to al-Qaida, and you're confused for a moment. Maybe it won't be over if they get Osama bin Laden (provided he isn't really in an supersecret Idaho prison). What if the "terrorists" hate you for their own reasons? The evildoer-in-chief said "they hate our freedoms" -- as if we have freedoms, really, just try and get a bike-messenger job that has full health benefits. But what if rights and mixed-sex education and an economy based on sustainable hemp-based art installations mean nothing to them? Maybe you could convince them to hold off while you fix Amerikkka. At least you can get it down to one k. Maybe if the Democrats take the House back. A 10-seat swing won't make the imams cool down, but 20 seats, in red states? Would that be a good-faith effort? You worry this will push Haditha off the front page. It's very important that everyone concentrate on the atrocities committed by U.S. troops every day. (It's such a relief not to have to pretend to support the troops anymore.) Anyway, nothing happened. Nothing blew up. If the suspects were planning something, they didn't do it, and this proves we can handle this as a law enforcement matter. Even though the police are racists. Your head hurts. You have a friend in Toronto. She's cool. It would kill her if these arrests were made possible by NSA eavesdropping. You find yourself almost wishing there was another real attack, so people could see the logical consequences of "fighting back" after 9/11. Yes, it would be bad, but sometimes you have to break an egg to show people the health impact of omelettes. Is it wrong to wish the Canadian terrorists might have succeeded? Shouldn't you know the answer to that question? June 7, 2006 http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks060706.html ---------------------- Iranian Islamist mentality. http://www.pcpages.com/ani/polgr/ina...t/islamist.htm |
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#2 (permalink) | |
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WAB Bartender
Defense Professional
Military Professional |
LOVED it.
Here's a complementary column from George Will: Quote:
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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory." - George Orwell |
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#3 (permalink) |
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Contributor
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I found an interesting web site that is watching some of the most dangerous terrorist facilitators.
http://www.campus-watch.org/ http://www.campus-watch.org/docs/type/research |
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#4 (permalink) |
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Homesick Fool
Military Professional
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I'm in the middle I guess. Do what we have to do such as bomb some people in question back to the stone age while at the same time I do care about the environment.
Global warming aside the crap we put into the air is not good for the lungs. |
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#6 (permalink) | |||
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Patron
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#7 (permalink) |
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Contributor
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A Conspiracy Against Us All
9/11 doubters discard the truth. By Andrew Cline Five years after 9/11, the truth about what happened that day is more thoroughly documented and widely available than ever. And yet the crackpot conspiracy theories alleging that the Bush administration orchestrated the attacks or allowed them to happen have become more deeply entrenched and broadly accepted than at any time since that terrible day. More than a third (36 percent) of the American public believes it is likely that the Bush administration either perpetrated the 9/11 attacks or deliberately failed to stop them “because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East,” according to a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll released last month. A Zogby poll in August 2004 found that half of New York City residents believed the Bush administration knew the attacks were coming and “consciously failed to act.” The true believers might be a tiny fringe element, but thanks to the Internet, hack academics, and a passive media, they have succeeded in planting a grain of doubt in the minds of a substantial number of Americans. The Internet is a brilliant vehicle for the dissemination of half-truths — or what only have the appearance of half-truths. Presenting one-sided versions of the story, which usually leave out mountains of available data, and armed with a few snapshots or video clips, conspiracy theorists have crafted page after page of “proof” of their theories. For example, photographs showing dust and smoke shooting out of the towers as they collapse are cited on website after website as proof that the towers were brought down by explosions. The theory is reasonable enough, so long as you ignore all the available evidence — which is exactly what the theorists do. Numerous engineers who’ve studied the towers, and even ones who haven’t, have concluded that the puffs of smoke and debris are the result of air being pressed outward by the force of the top floors falling. It is really rather elementary: The physical space occupied by any office building consists mostly of air; if the top floors fall, where does the air in the floors below go? Out. There is no other option. Yet the theorists claim that this perfectly expected expulsion of air is proof that bombs were used. The most prevalent theory is that the government brought the towers down by controlled demolition. This is what Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, put on leave by BYU last week, believes — once again, despite the preponderance of facts showing otherwise. Jones and his followers believe that the government placed thermite explosives in the buildings and brought them down by detonation. Never mind that thousands of pounds of explosives would somehow have to have been planted throughout the towers — in office space, behind walls, etc. — without anyone noticing. The “proof” of this theory is that the towers came down so quickly: The resistance of the lower floors would have slowed the collapse — unless, that is, the lower floors were exploded. The video evidence clearly refutes this claim. The towers unquestionably collapsed from the top down, not bottom up. The force of the collapsing top floors, combined with the weakened steel below, were enough to bring the towers down remarkably quickly — almost in free fall, in fact. A good example of the flimsiness of the conspiracy theories is the claim that a video shows “molten steel” falling from one of the towers. A jet-fuel fire is not strong enough to melt steel, so the picture “proves” that thermite explosives were used. The National Institutes for Standards and Training found was that the photo really shows melted aluminum from one of the aircraft. The theorists scream that melted aluminum is white, and the metal in question is clearly yellow, case closed. In its pure state, melted aluminum is white, but of course, it wasn’t pure when coming out of the towers. It was mixed with all the other burned debris, which changed its color. The conspiracy theories rely on just that sort of thinking. They approach 9/11 as if it were a controlled scientific experiment: In theory, things are supposed to work in a certain way; because they did not, the official story cannot be true. Conspiracy theorists have little patience for facts of life, such as bureaucratic incompetence, human error, and extreme conditions. They tend to believe that the government functions at peak, even superhuman, levels. Their regard for the government — or at least, for the competence of the government — is particularly strange. The top conspiracy theorist, David Ray Griffin, claims the official story cannot possibly be true is because “such incompetence by FAA officials is not believable.” The support of “academics” such as Griffin has lent much credence to the conspiracy mongers, but how credible are these academics? Last Wednesday Britain’s Daily Mail published a story claiming: “The 9/11 terrorist attack on America which left almost 3,000 people dead was an ‘inside job,’ according to a group of leading academics.” But the group in question, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, of which Griffin is the most prominent member, is in no sense a “group of leading academics.” It is a collection of like-minded crackpot theorists who happen to have some connection to academia. Scholars for 9/11 Truth claims about 300 total members, 76 of whom have “academic affiliations,” according to its founder, retired University of Minnesota-Duluth philosophy professor James H. Fetzer. He told this to my newspaper, the New Hampshire Union Leader, last month when one of our reporters discovered that a University of New Hampshire professor was a member and wanted to teach a class on 9/11. The UNH professor, William Woodward, teaches psychology — not engineering or physics — is a Quaker pacifist previously arrested for demonstrating at the office of U.S. Senator Judd Gregg, and has a long history of left-wing activism. When asked by a reporter to explain his theory that the planes were not hijacked airliners, Woodward admitted that he could not account for the missing passengers who boarded their flights and never returned. Nonetheless, he was convinced that he was right — because the official 9/11 report left too much unexplained, he said. That is how it usually is in the world of conspiracy theorists. It seems that they all claim the official story cannot be true because it has too many holes, yet goes on to posit a theory with holes large enough to, well, fly a jumbo jet through. Some members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth are or were legitimate academics of good standing at reputable institutions. Yet, of the 76 Fetzer identifies as having “academic affiliations,” there are many with questionable credentials. A partial list includes a “visiting professor of English” at Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea; an assistant professor of English literature at Dogus University in Istanbul; someone whose qualifications are listed only as “Radiology, Medical hypnosis”; another whose qualifications are “French language and culture”; someone who teaches at Tunxis Community College in Farmington, Conn.; another listed as “architect, communicator”; one professor of “English and theater” at the University of Guelph (that’s in Ontario); and one listed as “author, researcher 9/11, JFK, more.” These are some of the “leading academics” promoting the view that the government did 9/11. One author with an article posted on the Scholars for 9/11 Truth website goes by the name “Scooby Doo.” Of the 76 full members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, only four are listed as having backgrounds in physics, three in engineering; the other 69 “scholars” are mostly in the humanities and social sciences. Not quite what you’d expect when you hear that a group of “leading academics” supports the theory that the government was behind the attack. What do the vast majority of actual engineers and investigators who’ve studied the attacks conclude? Not unexpectedly, that the towers and the Pentagon were attacked by airliners hijacked by radical Islamic extremists, and the towers collapsed as a result of the aircraft collisions and fires. Every major investigation, from the 9/11 Commission to a panel of experts assembled by Popular Mechanics magazine to the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), has come to the same conclusion. And yet more and more people continue to believe the handful of conspiracy nuts. Why? The Internet bears some responsibility, of course. But the amateur speculation so prevalent there can be cancelled out to a large degree by top-notch investigative reporting, which is what the big media are supposed to do. In this, however, the media have been less than thorough, and, to a large extent, the 9/11 conspiracy theories have spread because the mainstream media have failed in their duty to get to the truth of the matter. Popular Mechanics did an excellent job refuting the conspiracy theorists, as has the NIST. But their work has been little explored by the mainstream press. On top of that, media outlets have tended to do puff pieces on the conspiracy theorists rather than expose their shoddy research. Too many reports on the conspiracy nuts treat them as if their ideas are to be given the same consideration as the facts. The conspiracy theorists are given the standard J-school “fairness treatment.” Get a quote from Person A and another from Person B, present both sides evenly, and leave it at that. The Washington Post did exactly that in its piece on the conspiracy theorists last Friday. What ever the merits of that approach, it doesn’t work in this case. None of the conspiracy theories can stand up to scrutiny; that they have stood up at all is mostly because the mainstream press has not given them any real scrutiny. The academics tend to be treated with the respect any other academic would get, and because they are professors the stories are made to read just like any other dispute between professors. But in reality, the scholars peddling the 9/11 theories are practicing almost entirely outside of their realm of expertise (e.g., Griffin, the theologian) and are an ultra-tiny minority dismissed as crackpots by the vast majority of the academic world, not to mention the world of engineering. As a result, five years after nearly 3,000 innocent people were slaughtered by radical Islamic terrorists, and just as the War on Terror enters an important new phase in which President Bush has vowed to take on both al Qaeda and its allies, and Iran and its puppets, a third of the American people reportedly think the enemy is not the jihadists, who are trying to destroy us, but our own government, which is trying to defend us against the real threat. This is a serious development. If people don’t understand who the real enemy is, if they doubt the very basis upon which our response to 9/11 was initiated, they are not going to support our necessary war against those who are trying to destroy us. One may have his doubts about the Iraq war; and the Bush administration, in its justification and execution, has earned a great deal of the skepticism about that conflict. But the War on Terror is another matter entirely. The skepticism about that has not been earned; it has been manufactured. We cannot allow the truth of what happened on 9/11 to be clouded by the conspiracy nuts. America cannot afford to lose the will to fight this war. — Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...RiMjRlOTVjZGM= |
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#8 (permalink) |
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Banished
Patron
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Even though Communism has failed all over the world, US and Brit leftie pinkos are still running round like chickens with their heads cut off, unable to handle the fact that red tyrants such as Stalin are pushing up daisies and their halfbaked doctrines should be buried with them, such as this garbage -
"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within." Joseph Stalin |
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#9 (permalink) |
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Banished
Patron
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Hey, the FBI's tipoff line is useful for reporting suspected US terrorist sympathisers, traitors,assorted lefties and anybody else you don't like.. ;)
https://tips.fbi.gov/ I've used it a few times myself, notably when a guy in an Islamic forum I was monitoring said "Watch for me on the news, I'm going to do something in America".. I hope Mulder and Scully soon nailed his a$$.. Last edited by Mick in England : 10-18-2006 at 01:07 AM. |
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#10 (permalink) |
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Banished
Patron
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Incidentally, although my opinion of leftie Democrats (and the Brit equivalent the Labour Party) is low, they're not all bad, for example I hear John "Hawk the Slayer" Kerry used to lead his gunboat flotilla up Nam rivers to hose down Charlies waterside villes with MG fire..
Pity he went soft after entering politics, voting against many important weapons such as -The armoured Bradley troop carrier. Perhaps he preferred US troops to patrol Baghdad in flimsy jeeps? -Patriot missile - excellent medium-range SAM, it protected Israeli cities from Saddams Scud missiles. -B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, the worlds best strategic bomber. -Aegis SAM warship, the worlds best defence vessel. -F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bomber, a first class carrier fighter-bomber, flies into the enemies back yard.. |
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#11 (permalink) | |
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Military Professional
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don't wish to be overly rude, but if you're 'Mick in England' why do you use American language patterns and slang, have an exhustive knowledge US senators voting patterns and an American serviceman in your avitar?
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before criticizing someone, walk a mile in their shoes.................... then when you do criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. |
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#12 (permalink) | |
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
Location: DPRK, Democratik People's Republik of Kalifornia
Posts: 9,365
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"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb. |
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#13 (permalink) | |
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
Location: DPRK, Democratik People's Republik of Kalifornia
Posts: 9,365
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I don't know the truths, but a Boston Globe's investigation revealed that the said encounter with VC was really a 16 year old boy running from his gunboat. He beached his boat, chased him down, and shot him in the back. His 3 purple hearts were all for minor injuries. One of which was described by a physician as "I've seen worse injuries from gardening" (or something to that effect). John Kerry's military service records were spotty at best. Of course these are all 3rd hand information that I have gathered from various news sources. I don't claim to know the truths. |
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#15 (permalink) | |
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Banished
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Pity Kerry's people didn't put that in a press release, it'd have got him the Presidency for sure, you know how people lurv real heroes especially backshooters.. Hey and what a mistake Lt Calley of My Lai Massacre fame never went into politics, he'd be in the White House by now and would be habitually giving orders to torch places like Fallujah.. |
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