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Don’t ask me what the long-term strategy behind these biennial attacks is supposed to be. But, from oh, say, November, it becomes harder with each passing week for the doom-mongers to argue that the lack of activity is consistent with bin Laden’s modus operandi. To be sure, I still read the in-depth reports by experts who say he’s alive and well and living on the Northwest Frontier. But, if he doesn’t show himself, then inevitably those ‘experts’ begin to sound like the fellows who claim to know the whereabouts of Lord Lucan or the truth about the Loch Ness Monster. It’s all very scientific, I’m sure, but sooner or later Lucan and Nessie have to do a bit of work and put in an appearance themselves.

Instead, Osama makes audio cassettes, and he licenses his subordinates to make audio cassettes, and they issue bloodcurdling threats against everyone from the Great Satan to hapless bystanders like Ireland and Canada, and none of those threats comes to pass. They’re all turban and no jihad. They were at it again the other day: ‘We announce there will be new attacks inside and outside [the US] which would make America forget the attacks of 11 September,’ said an al-Qa’eda spokesman.

Maybe he’s right, and by the time you read this Chicago and Atlanta will be ablaze. Or maybe it will be like all the other empty threats. Even in the Hindu Kush at the all-U-can-eat scorpion buffet, you can’t dine out on 9/11 for ever. This is a long war — but for America, with victories at home, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere, it’s been a pretty good start.

Good writing, that!

"If 9/11 liberated the Bush administration to put into action its scheme to take over the world, then it also liberated the Western elites to embrace finally and wholeheartedly anti-Americanism as the New Unifying Theory of Everything. It didn’t have to be like that: the intellectual class could have sided with the women of Afghanistan or the political prisoners of Iraq. But the advantage of sour oppositionism is that whatever happens there’s always something to sneer at."

"intellectual class" ?

"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive."
-- Thomas Sowell

Condi Rice apparently warned all kinds of people not to fly on 11 September. If that’s true, it seems odd that Don Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the conspiracy, didn’t warn himself not to go to the Pentagon that morning. You’d think, being in on the plot, he’d warn himself not to be sitting at his desk as the plane sliced through the building.........Rumsfeld knew the plane would hit the other side of the Pentagon well away from his office, so, if he coolly went to work as usual, he’d throw even expert conspiracy-sniffers like Meacher off the scent.

I knew that Rummy guy was a sly dog.

In the Guardian on Saturday, he demanded to know whether US air-security operations had ‘been deliberately stood down on 11 September’ in order to facilitate the attack. Who would do such a thing? Why, Rummy, Cheney, Wolfie and the other sinister graduates of the Project for a New American Century.

could it be that the so-called "peace dividend" during the latter part of the first Bush administration, and the entire klintoon administration - desolved the entire Nothern Tier Alert Forces, after all, (sarcasm) The Soviets are no longer a threat coming accross the North Pole - and the Canadians will catch everything else (/sarcasm) Thank God that someone decide to bring back the Nothern Alert Sector - It's a shame it had to be under 9/11.