Humor is a very good thing,,,but we are nearing the point where it will be regulated somehow,because it is actually,,,a quite dangerous,and threatening element,in the world of those who seek to control public opinion...One can get easily into trouble by attempting to make a statement through humor.

i took it seriously at the time, but felt that anyone who tried to shove ANYTHING down the afghani's throats was a fool...uh..wait a minute...

this friend expresses alot of opinions and is usually wrong about 90% of the time...on the 3 occasions that aliens were supposed to invade the planet earth, they didn't show up...uhhh, at least they didn't invite the mainstream media to a news conference...

in this case, i'm inclined to believe he was correct...

But the utilization of NLP adds a twist, in that it achieves the expected result faster. Which is even more dangerous to both deliberative processes in general, and the democratic process which is dependent upon it.

My point, though, was the technique being used here; and my observation of how easily otherwise intelligent people have been completely brainwashed. This is highly reminiscent of neurolinguistic programming, where the object of one's manipulations is brought to an emotional fever-pitch (for example, "face of evil", or "why do they hate us so much..", or ominous pictures of a sinister bearded character carrying an automatic weapon juxtaposed with pictures of airplanes colliding into the WTC) - then when they're at the peak of their emotional experience, one slips in a concept such as drug users, or limited freedoms for a while, or patriotism, to function as triggers.

Thereafter, any time the trigger is activated, all of the peak emotions associated with it are evoked, while the object is literally helpless - primarily because the object isn't even aware of what is going on.

Am I crazy here?

This is a very ingenious technique, that of juxtaposing two dimensions of the incident which are related only by coincidence. By that, I mean the intense focus on the human drama - the firefighters, the lost innocent lives, the bereaved families and so on - being used whenever the discussion gets uncomfortably close to the whys and wherefores.

Let me pose some thoughts. If the WTC had collapsed on its own for structural reasons and caused the same damage, would the tragedy and ensuing loss of life be any less horrific?

By the same token, if these airplanes were actually empty except for the hijackers, and had crashed into a remote Nebraska plain, would the actions of the perpetrators be any less dastardly?

In my mind, the only outcome of constantly associating the two, however, is to underscore the dichotomy of good and evil.

"Unfortunately, the cost of this policy is high, despite U.S. policymakers' denials. As Johnson writes, "For any empire, including an unacknowledged one, there is a kind of balance sheet that builds up over time" (p. 5).

Among the costs is what he terms blowback—"the unintended consequences of policies" (p. 8). One obvious form of blowback is terrorism. Johnson points to the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which was probably retaliation for the attack on Libya two years before, and to the bombing of New York's World Trade Center and the attacks on U.S. facilities in Africa and the Mideast. And such attacks continue: the attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, last fall was likely a response to Washington's attempt to extend its reach to even that distant nation by establishing intelligence facilities.

Johnson's discussion of terrorism should be required reading for every foreign-policy official in the new administration. Terrorism rarely occurs in an international vacuum. For the most part, foreign countries and gangs do not kill Americans for pleasure. Rather, they do so to wage what they view as war.

Writing of Osama bin Laden, Johnson notes that he "only turned against the United States in 1991 because he regarded the stationing of American troops in his native Saudi Arabia during and after the Persian Gulf War as a violation of his religious beliefs. Thus, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, if they were indeed his work, are an instance of blowback rather than unprovoked terrorism" (pp. 10–11). The solution, then, is not to strike out blindly with military strikes. As Johnson notes, "Instead of bombing sites in Sudan and Afghanistan in response, the United States might better have considered reducing or removing our large-scale and provocative military presence in Saudi Arabia" (p. 11).

Remember, folks, this was written before all Hell broke lose. but this part is especially important:

"Blowback is not limited to terrorism. Potentially more dangerous in the long term is the growing international perception of U.S. arrogance. One can quibble with some of Johnson's arguments—for example, that in 1997 in East Asia the International Monetary Fund acted in ways similar to the Soviets' actions in eastern Europe after World War II—but his examples of American arrogance and foolishness should cause any patriot to squirm.

and:

"The United States is an empire maintained at high cost to people at home and abroad. Those costs should be manifest to all, yet they do not seem to be apparent to those who formulate U.S. foreign policy. "Even when our country's actions have led to disaster, we assume that the motives behind them were honorable," writes Johnson (p. 217). Indeed, most Americans are simply oblivious:

What we have freed ourselves of, however, is any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe. Most Americans are probably unaware of how Washington exercises its global hegemony, since so much of this activity takes place either in relative secrecy or under comforting rubrics.

(Like, I would submit, the War on Drugs; would you like a foreign law enforcement presence on your soil, spying on it's citizens and yours, maintaining dossiers on you, and interfering with your nation's destiny? I would also respectfully submit that that is the very thing that is happening with the DEA opening an office in Vancouver.

"Many may, as a start, find it hard to believe that our place in the world even adds up to an empire. But only when we come to see our country as both profiting from and trapped within the structures of an empire of its own making will it be possible for us to explain many elements of the world that otherwise perplex us. (p. 7)

As usual, there was a voice crying in the wilderness the whole time. Many of us, Americans, patriots all, heard the same voice, and wondered why other's couldn't. And the WTC and the Pentagon are the result. But our 'leaders' have so much jingoistic scheisse in their ears they still can't hear it. And they threaten to bring a piecemeal, low budget, (but no less deadly) Armageddon on us all.

BLOWBACK: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. by Chalmers Johnson.

a pretty concise review can be found here: http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/books/tir54_johnson.html

I have suspected this and said so in a couple of comments. I have not seen any such stories, but would like to.

I expect that we will be attacked more. I think that George Bush has a very grim future, and that it is not inconceivable that he will be legally executed for his crimes.

I really do have better things to do than to get sprayed with bugs or get involved in a land war with china. christ.

THE DISMANTLING OF AMERICA

The current "war" on Afghanistani terrorism is a misdirection and a hoax. As pointed out in the book "Black Gold Hot Gold" the oil expected to flow from the vast oilfields under the Russian Caspian Sea, discovered about 20 years ago remains undrilled and untapped. That field contains about 500 years worth of oil at present world consumption rates. The only possible oil pipeline routes at the present time to handle the massive flow of oil from the Caspian Sea region under Chenya is either through Kosovo to the Mediterranean Sea, or through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. Two years ago, the Clinton administration attempted to place Kosovo under international control and begin pipeline construction, but was unable to complete the process.

The normal oil route would have been to move oil from Chenya, across the Black Sea and through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean. But the narrow Bosporus channel is already clogged with oil tankers from the existing Black Sea oilfields. The only alternate is to move the tankers from the Black Sea, bypassing the Bosporus, up the Danube River and then through a very short pipeline across Kosovo to the Mediterranean at Tirana, Albania. That process was stopped by the Chinese who have supplied and armed the Albanians, as a client state, since 1949.

Following the Soviet discovery of the vast Chechen oilfields in the late 1970's, they attempted to take control of Afghanistan to provide a massive pipeline system to allow the Soviets to market their oil directly from the Afghan-Pakistan seaport. This resulted in the decades long Soviet-Afghan war. The Soviets were stopped by the U.S. supplied and armed insurgent groups, including Osama bin Laden, who defeated the Soviets in the late 1980's.

The Soviets had massively built up their military in the 1980's, including the world's largest nuclear submarine fleet, gambling on the huge profits to be made by selling their Chechen oil on the open market. When the Afghans under bin Laden, backed by the U.S. CIA stopped the construction of the Soviet-Afghan pipeline, the Soviet Union went through an economic collapse and ceased to exist in 1991. The vast Chechen oilfield still remains fallow and untapped. As identified in "Black Gold Hot Gold," the Empire of Energy is now making a new attempt to market the Chechen oil by carpet bombing Afghanistan and building the Afghan pipeline.

George W. Bush's statement about declaring war on "terrorism" is obviously hollow and sallow. It strangely does not include the terrorists in Northern Ireland, nor even the terrorist suicide bombers among the Palestinians. Instead it makes an instant leap of logic to aim the U.S. military directly at Afghanistan.

The terrain in northern Afghanistan is the arid rugged foothills of the Himalayas known as the Hindu Kush and is defended by the large fierce tribal armies of the Northern Coalition who are excellent guerilla fighters with years of experience fighting Soviets, now backed by the Chinese, and not connected with the main Taliban government in Kabul. The Soviets spent over 10 years at great expense to attack and "carpet bomb" Afghanistan, but they found fortress Himalaya is impenetrable. The result was tremendous loss of Soviet lives and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

George Bush is now leading the United States down that same road. The Empire of Energy has for almost 100 years had as its goal the dismantling of the United States of America and amalgamating it into one large global energy market. They have found in George Bush a willing partner. Any war in Afghanistan would pit the U.S. against the Chinese who just last week, on the day of the Word Trade Center attack, signed a mutual pact with the Afghans.

In the last 50 years the U.S, has fought numerous wars against the Chinese, as in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. In those wars the result was always a draw with massive loss of life. Even high tech "smart" weapons in Kosovo were unable to defeat the Chinese. In the upcoming Afghan war with the Chinese, the U.S. will lose by simple attrition. Neither smart bombs or nuclear bombs work against hidden terrorists or against fortress Himalaya. There are more Chinese soldiers in uniform than the whole populaton of the U.S.

Numerous recent news stories indicate the attack on the World Trade Center was known to the CIA and FBI weeks before the attack. Seemingly nothing was done. As for America, its panzers ran out of gas with the "strange" fraudulent election of November 2000. Both G.W. Bush and Al Gore were backed by the Empire of Energy, so it didn't matter for whom you voted. Americans have been anesthetized and put to sleep by their lack of knowledge of world history, as America disintegrates.

The first five chapters of the book Black Gold, Hot Gold can be found here:

BLACK GOLD HOT GOLD The Rise of Fascism in the American Energy Business http://www.brojon.com/frontpage/bj050701-1.html

quickest way to get rid of said cop is to pay proper obeisance...let your lawyer pitch a bitch, if you have one after the guy with the glock, is safely over the horizon...

You're right about thanking the God I"claim",,,,He really is God,,,,I'd tell everyone more about him,,,but I dont want to annoy anyone,,besides that,,He's personally,and directly availiable 24/7 to anyone..

This is the shape of law enforcement, post 9/11. We can expect to see more hair-trigger attitudes and behavior in the weeks and months to come. No doubt culminating in several regrettable 'incidents' where innocent people are killed by the police...some of whom will be killed simply for standing up for their Constitutional rights not to be hassled.

(Gee, Yer Honor, I thought he was a terrorist; he was shoutin' at me about the Constitution or sumpin', and I thought he's crazy and gonna kill me, so's I shot 'im!" "Good job Officer Boot, and I hope you bag a few more like that; we don't need 'em in this free country of ours!")

Unocal's Bush White House Connection (english) by bob f. 9:07am Sun Sep 23 '01

The anti-semitic part of this analysis may be inaccurate, but the part about U.S. government policy towards Afghanistan being determined by the special corporate interests of Unocal may be true. A Special Assistant to President Bush and Senior Director for Gulf, Southern Asia and Other Regional Issues of the National Security Council, Zalmay Khalilzad, was employed by the transnational oil company, Unocal, which was involved in the proposed Afghan pipeline project until late 1998.

In its December 5, 1998 issue, the New York Times made the following reference to Unocal's involvement in the proposed Afghan pipeline project: "When Unocal joined the project in 1995, it was viewed by many analysts as the most audacious gambit of the 1990's oil rush on the Caspian.

"The idea was to pre-empt other companies trying to solve the region's greatest problem--it is landlocked--and transport oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Turkmenistan has the world's fourth-largest reserve of natural gas.

"There was to have been a 1,0005-mile oil pipeline and a companion 918-mile natural gas pipeline, in addition to a tanker loading terminal in Pakistan's Arabian Sea port of Gwadar...The company projected annual revenue of $2 billion, or enough to recover the cost of the project in five years...

"...Unocal opened offices in Kazakhustan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan. To help it sell the project to the many governments involved, Unocal hired senior United States diplomats like the former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger...Problems began with the Taliban's capture of the Afghan capital, Kabul, in September 1996. Unocal initially took a positive view of the movement's triumph..."

A January 18, 2001 UPI web site article contained the following reference to Special Assistant to the President Khalilzad: "One man who will likely be at the center of the next administration's policy is Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghani-American who served under President Reagan's State Department and President Bush's Pentagon...Khalilzad now finds himself...as the man in charge of staffing the Pentagon for the Bush-Cheney transition team...His close friend and old boss Paul Wolfowitz is likely to be the deputy to Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld...As an analyst for the RAND Corporation and before that the chief consultant for Unocal, the oil company that sought to build a pipeline through Afghanistan, maybe he has said too much: Charles Santos...worked with Khalilzad on a Unocal advisory group in 1996 and 1997..."

In a March 1999 interview with David Barmazian that appeared on Himal's web site, Eqbal Ahmad, indicated which special corporate interests had determined U.S. government policy towards Afghanistan in recent years: "Tecaco, Amoco, Unocal, Delta Oil--all these are now going into Central Asia to get hold of these oil and gas fields. They don't want to take any pipeline to Iran...So Afghanistan and Pakistan become the places through which you lay pipeline. And you cut the Russions out...In this game, both Pakistan and the U.S. get into the business of saying who will be the most reliable conduit to insure the safety of the pipeline...And they pick...the Taliban, to ensure the safety of the pipeline...The issuee is, who is more likely to ensure the safety of the oil and gas resources."

And on 10/14/96, Time Magazine's International Web site had noted: "Western oil companies, like California's Unocal, are thirlled with the prospect that work may actually begin on a $10 billion-to-$15 billion project to develop Turkmenistan's natural gas resources and build pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan."

Gee, that happened right around the same time as all of those congratulatory articles in the American mainstream liberal media touting how wonderful it was that the strict Taliban could get the Afghan opium farmers to stop growing opium.

This issue is too important to be pimped as nothing more than a way to attack Bush.

Where were the Democrats when Al Gore declared a Drug Free America at the convention?

Sitting glassy-eyed in front of the TV, appauding him and hoping he would win.

Does anyone imagine that he would NOT have made the same deal if he had won?

Chiropracters would have been needed all over America to bend Democrats back into shape after all the twsting and turning they would be doing now to defend Gore's decision on the Taliban.

most of them ignore me when i express my personal opinions concerning recent events...few read a newspaper, or see anything but the network news...they are involved with their personal lives and feel that they are powerless to change anything...and in truth, don't understand that anything is fundementally wrong in the first place...

my personal interest was reignited after 2 decades(war protester and political deviant in the viet nam years) by my experience with the self serving legal system...i became outraged, and this has not subsided in the last 3 years...

you folks have not done anything to assuage my fears..THANK YOU!

the point i'm veering toward is that waking joe sixpack won't happen unless HIS toes are stepped on, HARD... our leaders have good advice on how to "gently" turn our once free(er) country into a police state...all we can do is keep talking, planting seeds of doubt about our country's course of action...a vocal minority(us) can have an impact far beyond our numbers, with perserverance...

And, lest I fall in to Bill Maher trap, let me emphasize at the outset that I am referring to the politicians - all the way down from the President to the junior Senator and freshman in Congress - or should that be.."freshperson"?

Put your money where your mouth is - literally. We know that over a 100,000 airline employees have taken a 100% pay cut. As a demonstrable sign of patriotism, I recommend that all politically elected officials and appointees in the country take a 50% cut in their salaries - immediately. The resulting savings would be redirected to a specific expense item in the "war" effort.

In addition, reduce the Capitol security by 50% - we all know that the interns are the ones who need the protection - and redeploy them to the Washington, DC area airports; Reagan, Dulles and BWI.

Symbolic? Yes. But also useful.

"Bush, a puppet dangeling from strings held by people who work for his old man, is merely a hood-ornament on our government: HIs job is to "seem" like a presidential figure. Walk, talk, gesture. Somebody else is driving."

Extra good.....Unfortunately,,I'll have to pay you later because terrorists have severely depleted my funds.

But, it is also a sad commentary, don't you agree? We, as Americans (and by this, I mean the people...you and me...and everybody who is entitled to the privilege of voting), who unceasingly pat ourselves on the back for being such a free and democratic society, are therefore even more responsible for demonstrating un-sheeplike traits than the rest of the world.

But...I know you agree..:)

The main reason for my obscured suggestion about not blaming sheep,,,,relates to my usual equestrian fatality,that I cannot seem to stop clubbing.

The only world that a sheep knows,is the world of the fields,and pastures that it has been led to by the shepard.The sheep only knows what the shepard wants it to know.If the shepard says the wolves are nearby,and that he has found a bunch of sheep costumes,with wolf DNA on them,,in the trunk of an old tree,then the sheep will all say;"Oh dear,,what can we do",,so the deranged,and corrupt shepard says that the anti-wolf campaign will require that every one in the flock will have to be checked to make sure that they are not just wearing a sheep costume,,,,

OK,,,I got carried away,,but the long and the short of it,is that how can you blame a flock of people,who have been misled,and misinformed,,for not reacting in an appropriate manner?If the facts are being twisted,and filtered before they are published in the Angora Herald,,or The Cashmere Post,or heard on NSR,(National Sheep Radio),,then we cant blame the mis-informed,and manipulated flock,for not reacting in a reasonable manner,,,,I'm afraid the evil shepard is to blame,,,,,,and the worst of it is,,,it turns out that the slime-ball of a shepard,,is a good buddy with the wolf!

It's a misnomer: a misuse of a specific word to mean something else. A terrible, but common practice.

I couldn't say, given the history of America, we ever had Innocence in the way people generally mean. We kicked ass in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812. We blew each other to bits in the civil War. We crafted a role as the worlds Policeman with WWI and II..and Korea...and Viet Nam. By the time we got to Grenada we we regular"war ho's" it would seem.

Perhaps they mean the attack being against Americans..on American soil. There have been pipe bombs and such threats in this country for 100 years, picking up in the last 50. "Christains" bombing Abortion Clinics while the police kick down doors in SWAT Raids to arrest people growing pot in thier basements. Across america law enforcement is in court indicted on abusing, framing, and killing the people they are supposed to protect. Hmmmm... no innocence there, either.

What I think is more appropriate is the cliché of "the wake-up call". And I think the attacks are exactly that. They are a call to get out of our "comfort zone" and to grow up a little.

I was greatly concerned last year that so many people were scared silly by "The Blair witch". Given the general american reaction to that simple film, I feel safe referring to a vast percentage of the American population as sheep. Total creatures of the herd, contentedly grazing in the rich fields of the american economy, torporous with thier iillusions of saftey and of the invincibilty of their shepherds which had been tattooed into their brains by American Mass media.

America has changed because it's sleep has been severely disturbed: the fields seem as if they will turn brown and the sheperds dropped the ball. They do know how to make war, but this time the targets are enigmas and we cannot just shoot into the dark like crazy people.

The Attack is a profound message. Wake up. See what you are doing around the world. You are under siege and you must deal with it.

And..its nothing less than an evolutionary event. We will evolve as a people and as a species from our responses to the challenge forced upon us.

I don't even know what to begin to think of this remark. It is a sad commentary indeed on what is supposed to be a democracy.

On the one hand, yes...how could you blame a sheep?

On the other hand, you can blame American sheep, because they are supposed to live under our "cherished ideals" of freedom and democracy. They should know better. They should read more, keep up with events as they unfold and use innate human intelligence to correlate them. You do it and I do it; so why can't everyone else?

You sure can't blame Afghan sheep.

As I stated during my rantings after the Rainbow Farm incident, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. When less than half the people in this country vote, and the overwhelming majority of them are either totally oblivious to the presence of parties other than the Republicrats, or see them as some sideline joke....when the objective of your average voter is to back the winning horse - what do you expect????

Regardless of what we think of him, how many people think that the whole Gary Condit media blitz may have been orchestrated to lull people into a false sense of security?

.....how could you blame a sheep for anything?

It is they who are responsible for cozying up to the Taliban. The reasoning for doing so may be little more than the Taliban - known world-wide as egregious violators of human rights - having given lip service to the US Federal Government that they hate opium poppies...and "mary-ju-wanna" too.

They are willing to kill people for cannabis related offenses DESPITE being the point of origin for some of the world's greatest hashish, which they sold just a couple years ago to fund their efforts against the Soviet Union. (We even helped them, then. which Governmaent agency trained bin Laden??).

Now they want to call us EVIL and target us for termination. That's just not neighborly.

Americans - like me and probably you - are no more a threat to the Taliban than The average Afghan citizen is a threat to me. This is between our cross-eyed and arguably corrupt Federal Government and a bizarre and mean-spirited band of old men who operate under the cover of being a fundamentalist religion.

When Religions go "fundamental",(a great name for FOX TV show?) whatever intelligent foundation they had, disappears. Jesus would be no more happy with the Church of Rome (Catholic Church) sacking The Islamic Empire in the 11th century (approximate date) in His name, than Mohammed would be with the Islamic Jihad declaring all americans evil in His. It is just not in their respective philosophies to tolerate the actions in which egregious and unconscinceable actions which are reportedly "done in thier names".

yet, here we are giving dangerous people MILLIONS of dollars. I noted they were on CNN recently pleading with america to not make them into a stone-age parking lot.

The message to Bush, his handlers,AND his buddies in the Taliban is "be careful who your friends are..."

By the way, I wonder how many times we can lose our "innocence". I thought we lost it in WW2, then when JFK was assasinated, then again during Vietnam. It is obviously pretty easy to regain one's innocence, seeing that we've done it so many times.

"I believe, and I know I am not alone here, that we single-handedly funded the attacks by the Taliban."

Thanks for pointing out my error.

Think about that. We knew all of the horrible things these people were doing not just three and a half months ago, but years ago, yet we rewarded them (more than once, by the way) with monetary aid that the people of Afghanistan never saw. The Taliban is itself a terrorist organization (if you don't believe this, ask any Afghani woman. No, wait--you can't do that. Afghani women are not allowed to speak about the way they are treated), yet the Bush administration has had no problem with sending that organization large sums of money.

I believe, and I know I am not alone here, that we single-handedly funded the attacks on the Taliban. Why else would the government be scrambling to "discover" who funds Osama bin Laden? They're looking for a scapegoat. And was anyone surprised when they "discovered" that he is, in part, funded by drug money?

This whole thing stinks beyond belief. Charities and businesses also funded Osama bin Laden? Yes, I guess I can believe that--American businesses who paid for this attack with their tax dollars, and some very large "charitable donations" made by the American government.

Finally, the way the Bush administration is rushing to destroy our remaining liberties, I would not argue against the person who suggests that the money the Bush administration sent the Taliban in May was payment for creating a situation that would satisfy both sides' common goal: the end of freedom in America.

Note: As I've said before, I'm not going to attack anyone who wants to speak out against what I have written here, although I may respond with counterarguments. I'll defend your right to disagree; please offer others the same courtesy.