Posted on 05/15/2007 8:04:25 PM PDT by Remember_Salamis
If the Islamists are “freedom killers”, why haven’t they dirty bombed the heck out of Amsterdam??
Not on their agenda at present.
And that is exactly the message I have been trying to get across to the Lew Rockwells (Cindy Sheehan's boy-toy) Harry Brownes, and Ron Pauls for years. This stuff about how standing aside and letting megalomaniacs -- be they Hitler, Hirohito, or bin Laden -- do their worst while the U.S. "minds its own business" calls for the world to take such tyrants at their word that once allowed to take their inch, they won't go for the mile.
One can only wonder what would have happened if the Nazi threat had been deemed unworthy of American sacrifice. Listen to isolationists? I would defer to Winston Churchill, the guy who said "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." He helped stop the Nazi war machine. What's your guy got?
This is not a matter of opinion. I am simply asking you whether or not you know of anyone within the CIA actually having admitted to working with OBL - or even within the ISI, or even OBL’s mujaheddin - not whether you’ve read an article or a thousand that repeats the same old unsubstantiated innuendo.
I wouldn’t exactly be shocked to find out that Winston Churchill fits the future Mr. Cindy Sheehan’s idea of a “neocon interventionist.”
Al-Qaida has nuclear weapons?
I guess I believe in the tooth fairy because they did indeed attack us because of our freedoms.
Our involvement in the Middle East or any other “reason” they listed is just an excuse. If it wasn’t for those “reasons”, they would have come up with other “reasons”.
Freedom and extreme Islam mix like oil and water in case no one has noticed. You live the way they tell you to live, or you die.
That is extremely dangerous thinking there. Prior to 9/11, most of us would have said that they had zero ability to completely flatten the Twin Towers and hit the Pentagon. It never occurred to us that they would hijack planes and use them as missiles.
Ok, so that probably won't happen again because passengers probably won't let it happen again, but there are other ways.
They set off a bomb in an elementary school. It wouldn't be hard to do. The point is not necessarily to kill a bunch of kids. It's to terrorize.
Next day another school in another part of the country is bombed.
This happens a couple more times until parents are too terrified to let their children go to school. There are not enough babysitters to watch all of these kids, and most moms are working now too, so somebody will have to quit their job to stay home with the kids.
This doesn't even take into consideration a situation like Pakistan being overtaken by the extremists there (and they have nukes), or Iran, or North Korea working with them, or Saudi Arabia being taken over by their extremists (no nukes, but they have the oil we need).
You are FOOLISH if you think we are not capable of being toppled or permanently damaged.
But wait, you are also one who thinks the real reason we were attacked is for the reasons they themselves gave, so why am I trying to explain this to you? You just don't seem to get it, do you?
Well, one possibility, one espoused by Pat Buchanan (among others), is that the Nazis and the Communists would have wiped each other out, preventing a Cold War.
While the Commies and the Nazis were wailing on each other, we should have devoted FULL resources to attacking the Japanese; we would have finished them off much faster, IMHO.
That'll be in the classified operation histories. Understandably, its hard to imagine Langley rushing to take credit for OBL.
Plausible deniability isn't a punchline at the CIA.
According to the unclassified 1998 CIA biography of bin Laden: By 1984 Osama was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar (MAK) --which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
MAK was funded and supplied by the Pakistan’s state security services (ISI). The CIA didn't trust the native tribal factions in Afghanistan, --quite probably they couldn't understand --or "read" the loyalties of the rivalry-ridden natives.
But for whatever reason, and as a matter of public record, the CIA was willing to deal with the ISI, and let the ISI pick the out the good chaps from the bad.
As Arabs militants flocked to Afghanistan from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia; The ISI gave them money and guns, too.
One of those groups being Osama bin Laden's MAK.
By the end of the Afghan war in 1989, with the Soviets ousted from Afghanistan, bin Laden was welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy. --But like many other Afghan vets, or Afghanis as the Arab mujahedeen called themselves, Osama bin Laden had gone radical.
In fact, while he returned to his family’s construction business, bin Laden had already split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.
In 2001, Al Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, confirmed that the Afghanis did not receive any U.S. funding during the war in Afghanistan. Although technically correct, al-Zawahiri failed to note the funding provided by the ISI, or the funding provided by the Saudi royals, matching the CIA dollar-for-dollar, passing thru the same ISI conduit.
Pakistan is not a rich country and little known for waging covert wars, but their ISI is not above a little under the table dealing.
Especially when the big dogs like the United States and the Saudis are playing ... and paying.
So do you think it was tax-dollars from the CIA or petro-dollars from Saudi Arabia? Or was it a little double dealing by the ISI?
Or just a classic case of plausible deniability?
Oh, not worried about Paul. What I -am- worried about is how gullible so many people in the general population and on FR are for a perpetual candidate's garbage.
They rag on Bush for taking risk and dealing with hard problems, but they love listening to an idiot who talks big in the comfort of knowing he will NEVER have to deal with it for real.
Israel. Spain. France. The UK. Australia. The Philippines. Do I need to keep going? OK. Sudan. Chad. Even China.
They're not attacking us because we're "over there." They're attacking us BECAUSE WE ARE NOT MUSLIMS AND THEY ARE. They hate us BECAUSE WE DO NOT PRAY TO MECCA. They hate us BECAUSE WE DO NOT LIVE UNDER SHARI'A. What's your boy Ron Paul going to do about that, put on a shalmar kaweez, start praying to Mecca five times a day, rename himself Abu al-Libertarian, and start stoning adulteresses in Lafayette Park?
I like Ron Paul, I really do. If it wasn't for his foreign policy, I could almost vote for the guy. And I even agree that the way we got into this is unconstitutional. But we ARE in it. What do we do now, cut and run with Iraq half-done? We can't change the past. We can't change the fact that the proper declarations of war weren't issued in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can't change the fact that we've got one boot deep in the Iraqi tarpit and we're taking casualties even as we're slowly, slowly turning the country on the right path.
Paul seems not to grasp that we could abandon Israel to the jackals, withdraw every single member of our military from within a thousand miles of the Middle East, and adopt a totally hands-off policy toward all Islamic states, and it wouldn't do a damn thing except strengthen both the Sunni and the Shi'ite extremists. Then one day, somewhere down the road (and not that far), we'd be dealing with a much greater threat, one that COULD "topple or seriously damage" us.
His foreign policy is at best breathtakingly naive, and at worst suicidal. Isolationism did not work between the World Wars, and seventy years later, with the world so much more interconnected, it's not going to work now. And yes, I know he didn't mean that we deserved it, he was listing the alleged "causes." He really trusts what OBL himself said? Please.
}:-)4
Nope, just like it is absurd for us to try and force "democracy" upon Arabs, who have never had it and are not capable of maintaining it.
Rudy and Ron are both wrong. They don’t hate us because we have women’s rights. They attack us because they know we are weak and divided, and the goal of Islam is to dominate the world. They can attack us anywhere, and retreat into the shadows, and watch as we fight amongst ourselves. The President has failed because he did not bring sufficient brutal force to bear, and because he treats his own soldiers as criminals when they make a mistake. We succeeded in WWII because we did whatever was necessary—including unspeakable horrors against civilians (100,000 on a single night in Tokyo essentially burned to death, ditto in Dresden)—in order to utterly destroy the enemy. We have not only shown no stomach for such a battle against Islam, we whine about “Arab democracy” and fear for the reaction of the “Arab street”, which demonstrates only weakness to the enemy.
Hey - I was responding to the guys ENTIRE post, not just one little sentence...I know its common practice on here for people to pick apart responses to make it look like something it isn’t.... He used a metaphor that if your stung by a bee, do you go flailing around trying to knock down every beehive you see? Or do you use more strategic tactics? We will not win the war on terror by just bombing and invading other countries. That was my point, and has nothing to do with “surrender”.
Fars would you please link the research site to this lady on Jimmy Carter involvement with OBL? I have been away and lost the link.
Thanks Much!
Here's one article written by Miniter that challenges the link. Allegedly OBL's funds came from the Saudis matching US dollars, not actual US dollars.
To say that the ISI may have mixed the funds is a far cry from proving that the US supplied OBL "with the best of the best military equipment we had," as Davey Crockett wrote. I await the weblink from FARS though.
Anything is possible. You think Stalin would have defeated Hitler without US support?
I think the Brits would have had a problem without US support.
Or do you think the negotiated agreement subsequent to their declaring war on us, would have allowed us to continue supporting Hitler's enemies?
I'm familar with Mr. Miniters work.
from the article:
In the course of researching my book on Bill Clinton and bin Laden, I interviewed Bill Peikney, who was CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1984 to 1986, and Milt Bearden, who was CIA station chief from 1986 to 1989. These two men oversaw the disbursement for all American funds to the anti-Soviet resistance. Both flatly denied that any CIA funds ever went to bin Laden. They felt so strongly about this point that they agreed to go on the record, an unusual move by normally reticent intelligence officers. Mr. Peikney added in an e-mail to me: “I don’t even recall UBL [bin Laden] coming across my screen when I was there.” ...Pretty convincing so far, CIA station chiefs Bill Peikney and Mitt Bearden denied that any CIA funds ever went to bin Laden. But Peter Bergen, CNN journalist and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University interviewed Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran ISI's Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987:
There were two entirely separate rebellions against the Soviets, united only by a common communist enemy. One was financed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and was composed of Islamic extremists who migrated from across the Muslim world. They called themselves “Arab Afghans (search).” Bin Laden was among them. When the Saudis agreed to match U.S. contributions dollar-for-dollar, the sheikhs insisted that their funds go exclusively to the “Arab Afghans,” possibly including bin Laden. Meanwhile, U.S. funds went exclusively to the other rebellion, which was composed of native Afghans. Mr. Bearden told me: “I challenge anyone to give any proof that we gave one dollar to any Arab Afghans, let alone bin Laden.”
"It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan".Hmmm. Bill & Mitt's story isn't quite as air-tight as Miniter makes it sound.
Allegedly OBL's funds came from the Saudis matching US dollars, not actual US dollars.
Allegedly yes, but both the Saudi money and CIA money went through the ISI funnel. And like Brigadier Yousaf said :"No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen", ...
So how would the CIA know who got the funds and arms?
I guess our children or grandchildren will get to read about it in the declassified histories in 2101.
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