Fidel Castro believes Wikileaks documents prove Bin Laden is US spy

IamInnocent

I am convinced that Fidel Castro is on the CIA paylist. There is no explanation for the best spies in the USA to miss their target every time. Same for the other guy in Venezuela (any of them ;) ).

Teller

Chavez sells the US a million barrels of oil a day. I’d say that’s on the paylist.

Anonymous

Why I’ve always questioned the official story:
How would radical muslim militants/extremists (anything but THAT word) benefit from having us afraid? I don’t think their goal was to just kill us. They had to spend money too, they didn’t spend that much just to kill us and make us afraid. Who benefitted more them or our government?

Anyone who thinks this story is complete is a damn fool. Something is up. I dont know what, but something. They would have found him by now, undeniable.

kaminariko

“If you are forced to admit that there is no devil, you might have to question the existence of God.”
–I don’t know if anyone famous ever said this, but it sounds like it would be a good quote from a philosopher or psychologist or someone.

If we are forced to admit that there isn’t some vast evil conspiracy guiding the destruction of our country/species/planet/whatever, then we also might have to examine the dubious existence of some omnipotent, benevolent leader guiding us to some sort of salvation. The ramifications of discovering that nobody is driving the runaway train are too much for most people, I would imagine.

In other words if you can convince yourself that a force of Evil exists, then it makes the belief in a force of Good that much easier. The existence of neither suggests a certain existential nihilism.

That’s my theory, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Actually, it’s probably already someone else’s theory, with an official name and taught in Philosophy 101 or something; I’m just too uneducated to know whose.

mdh

Christ, what an asshole.

mdh

and I do mean every single person mentioned in that article.

Anonymous

Fidel Castro is senile.

Anonymous

Hahaha…. Tim Osmond

max

honestly, everything he said wouldn’t really surprise me at this point.

James

I wish it was less plausible. But it wouldn’t be the first villain on the CIA payroll, or aided by the CIA- think of Manuel Noriega, or even Saddam Hussein. Likely? No. But within the realm of reason & possibility? Sadly, yes.

Bionicrat2

I guess logic is even scarcer in Cuba than Tylenol.

Zac

Any commenters who think this is plausible also think the U.S. government was behind 9/11, Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll, and Roosevelt ordered Pearl Harbor.

Congratulations, you have see through their lies.

P.S. That whole not running with scissors thing, total BS.

AnnaMossity

I’ve wondered about that also! Remember when Obama was running for President, he used to bring it up and he promised that, if elected, he’d make sure that OBL would be “brought to justice.” Now that he’s IN, we never hear any more about it. I’m thinkng there MUST be some secret that he was let in on; Either that he was given safe harbor by the US/CIA, or that we DID in fact kill him already, and just don’t want him to be made into a martyr by the Muslim world. I wouldn’t put ANYTHING past Rumsfeld / Chaney…

Cowicide

“Who showed that he [Bin Laden] is indeed a CIA agent was WikiLeaks. It proved it with documents,” he said, but did not explain exactly how.

Castro is just askin’ questions? Maybe he watches too much FOX “News” with Glenn Beck?

Anonymous

I don’t agree with the conspiracy theory (I rarely do, as they usually give way too much intellectual credit to the gov’t), but what Castro said about Bin Laden being a great way to up the fear quotient was certainly true. We the people gave up a lot in the name of the “war on terror”…unsurprisingly, most of the population is still terrified. So apparently we’ve lost that war too…

I also agree with the final two paragraphs: “Humanity ought to take care of itself if it wants to live thousands more years,” he said.”

The dude’s got a point with that.

Anonymous

I don’t know if it’s a crime, but lying to the American people about war isn’t acceptable. It’s fucking treasonous. As is the incredible mishandling of strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan seemed to be going well, but somewhere along the line we forgot that they spent 20 years fighting the Soviets. In Iraq: ‘Mission Accomplished’. ‘Nough said.

It’s not like he (Bush) was getting a blow job and thought he shouldn’t tell us. His administration started a war on false pretenses that is ongoing. And both of our constructed states are tottery and weak. Who knows when we’ll actually pull all of our troops out? And when we do, Iraq and Afghanistan will crumble. I could be wrong, but I’m probably not.

We’re trapped in these situations too. If we pull our troops out before powerful, secular democracies are in place, those areas will become the ‘terrorist haven’ that we claimed to be preventing. And more people will have a reason to want to kill Americans.

Western domestic and foreign policy, specifically American, has been abysmal and idiotic of late. Welp, I’m off to continue my trudge to 1984.

rchrd

It’s 1984 all over again. Orwell had it right.

Antinous / Moderator

If the most powerful nation on earth had plotted to kill me with an exploding cigar, I might be a little twitchy, too.

sapere_aude

If the most powerful nation on earth had plotted to kill me and repeatedly failed due to sheer incompetence, I might be more than a little skeptical about conspiracy theories that paint that nation as some sort of omnipotent global puppetmaster.
Cowicide

Sometimes a cigar is just a… pipebomb.

Frank W

I don’t know what’s true. Ever. At best, I know where I’d put my money. But if I were looking for Osama Bin Laden, the first place I’d look would be #$%& Cheney’s Rolodex.

Frank W

You have been at war with a couple of guys with box cutters. For nine years. With no end in sight. You ought to ask yourselves some hard questions.

malex

Let’s be frank, here… The CIA tried to assassinate him HOW many times?

I think he’s entitled to some conspiracy theories.

Alex_M

I think the more likely scenario is that Castro _doesn’t_ believe OBL is working directly for the CIA.

He’s a smart guy and he knows that by making that claim, he’s get a lot of attention focused on the quite real scare-tactics that were nonetheless used by the Bush administration. By pointing to the Wikileaks leak, he’s getting attention focused on real dirty tricks by the CIA & co.

Basically he’s trolling the CIA.

Nadreck

Never mind trying to tie all those tiny factoids into evidence of a Global Conspiracy: the actual troublemakers are clearly identified in that picture! That tartan clear identifies Castro as a member of the Clan Cameron! We Macintoshes have been trying warn you lot about them for centuries but ya still dinna ken.

Gilbert Wham

That’s just what a MacIntosh WOULD say. Devious to the core…

Anonymous

So he was re-hired?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA-Osama_bin_Laden_controversy

Anonymous

To begin with could Castro be referring to about this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1297916/Wikileaks-reveals-Osama-Bin-Laden-seen-village-meetings.html

And:

The quote from Granma (english edition) actually reads:

“Every time that Bush went out to instill fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden appeared saying what he was going to do and making threats. Bush was never lacking in support from Bin Laden. I seemed line a tableau and it was Wikileaks that demonstrated that he WAS, EFFECTIVELY a CIA agent. They proved it with documents.”

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/cuba-i/27agosto-Humanity.html

It does NOT say (as the Guardian article states):

“Who showed that he [Bin Laden] IS INDEED a CIA agent was WikiLeaks. It proved it with documents,”

Setting aside that we are relying on translation that leaves lines like “I seemed line a tableau”. Changing the word “was” to “is” and “effectively” to “indeed” is a serious distortion of his statement.

Here’s the same statement in it’s original form:

“Cada vez que Bush iba a meter miedo y a pronunciar el gran discurso, aparecÃa Bin Laden haciendo la historia de lo que iba a hacer y amenazando. Nunca le faltÃ³ a Bush el apoyo de Bin Laden. ParecÃa un cuadro, y quien demostrÃ³ que efectivamente era un agente de la CIA fue Wikileaks. Lo demostrÃ³ con documentos.”

And here’s the (bad) Google translation:

“Every time Bush was going to put fear and deliver the big speech, Bin Laden appeared by the story of what was going to do and threatening him. Never missed Bush’s support for bin Laden. It looked like a picture, and who showed that actually was a CIA agent was Wikileaks. He proved with documents. “

Salvatron

Wow… what a complete non-story about a non-issue. Are ‘journalists’ really this bored/apathetic?

Trotsky

A couple of things… first, it’s impossible to truly know what Castro thinks or doesn’t think about this or anything else because this opinion being attributed to him is being filtered through the US/UK press. They routinely distort the remarks of a Castro or Chavez or whoever is on the “allies’” shit list.

Second, if the remarks are indeed the opinion of Castro, I would have to disagree (about the WikiLeaks documents proving bin Laden is a “spy.” Not necessarily Castro’s assertion that bin Laden works with or for US intel, which I agree with. BTW, “spy” is a nebulous, anachronistic, and essentially useless term as modern intel rarely designates resources in this manner. Asset is a better term), but cannot definitively say so since I have not read the documents. It should also be noted that Castro is not some old man with a keyboard and dial-up living in Nebraska. He has an entire intel network at his disposal, so even if he hasn’t read or analyzed data directly, he most certainly has people who do and are likely quite good at it. I think it is safe to say he has more assets at his beck and call than the Guardian, Boing Boing, or the readers of both.

Also, every commenter on this thread who is a head of state, please raise your hand. Thanks. Does that count for everything? No. But it counts for something.

Third, if any human on the planet has the right, the direct experience, the credibility to claim even the most insane of US intel plots, it would be Castro. Anyone who knows anything about the ridiculous, but also deadly and vicious, schemes that US intel (and our allies) have directed against Castro and Cuba, knows full well that anything is possible.

Bin Laden was a US intel asset. Not unreasonable by any stretch to assume that he is and always has been. Of course, speculation and evidence are two different things. But entertaining the possibility of bin Laden as an asset deserves consideration. Serious, serious consideration. Certainly a serious consideration that makes the accusations of Watergate pale in comparison, and to date, that consideration has not been extended on an official level, and likely never will.

Also, the “bin” in “bin Laden” is not capitalized unless it begins a sentence. Stop doing that, please.

Finally, the best way to understand the bin Laden connection to US intel? Examine the circumstances surrounding the death of Salem bin Laden and the place where he died. The patriarch of the bin Laden fortune at that time, resident of Orlando, Florida died in a “plane” crash near San Antonio, Texas in 1988. His father Mohammed bin Laden was killed in Saudi Arabia in a plane crash in 1967. A report on Salem was not filed by the NTSB because it was claimed he was flying an ultra-light aircraft. There are conflicting reports as to whether he was flying an ultra-light aircraft or a Beechcraft (specifically a BAC 1-11, according to a pre 9/11 PBS Frontline report on Osama bin Laden which has since been altered, all copies now lost) similar to the plane in which his father died. The type of Beechcraft flown in both cases are the stock aircraft of choice for CIA missions and featured prominently, for example, in the Iran-Contra affairs of Oliver North, used for weapons and drug runs in Central America.

Anyone who digs up the details about who Salem and Mohammed were with when they died in the plane crashes and peripheral circumstances will have as much evidence as they need.

None of this shit gets any sort of cursory analysis in the US. Round filed in the conspiracy theory ghetto. The only conspiracies Americans are capable of processing are conspiracies involving baseball players and steroids, cheating celebrities, and ballot stuffing American Idol. Additionally, we subscribe whole-heartedly to conspiracies in other countries, but never here. Russians capable of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko? “Oh, hell yes. They’re Russians, after all.” But America? Nah. That’s crazy.

“We” are not like “them.”

Likely, Castro understands the US better than all but a handful of Americans. Don’t be so quick to dismiss his remarks with knee-jerk snarkery.

You know nothing.

dw_funk

I think it’s your zeal that does it to people.

The reason we all instinctively scoff at this argument is because it’s ridiculous on its face. Most conspiracy theories, including this one, fail a simple and important test; if it’s true, why hasn’t anybody blabbed about it? Certainly, there wouldn’t be secret memos in the Wikileaks files; that level of secrecy didn’t save Bush’s wiretapping or torture policy.

And then, what would be the point? Cheney gets rich off the military-industrial complex, but there are probably easier ways of doing that than setting a domestic terrorist attack into motion. If this was a conspiracy, why didn’t we find WMDs? Why didn’t the movers use anything to their advantage? Cheney and Bush don’t need the money, and I doubt bin Laden does either. So what do they get? What’s the payoff?

There is none. The only way this works is if Cheney and bin Laden have a sit down during the Reagan administration and plan all this out years in advance. Which is also the most awesome idea for a Tom Clancy novel ever.
- AnnaMossity
  
  You ask “What’s the payoff?” and debunk the theory by saying Cheney and Co. are already very rich men; But it’s most probably not ABOUT money! They had all the filthy lucre one could ever need; It was (if it happened that way) so that they could roll back the progressive implementations of civil liberties, and bring us closer to “The Good Old Days,” the 1950s. And if that WAS their plan, it was markedly successful… Correct me if i’m wrong, but I haven’t heard even a whisper about President Obama taking any steps to reveal “The USA/P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act!”
- AnnaMossity
  
  “REPEAL” The PATRIOT Act, not reveal… Oops; I shoulda proofread!
- SpaceGhost
  
  “And then, what would be the point? Cheney gets rich off the military-industrial complex, but there are probably easier ways of doing that than setting a domestic terrorist attack into motion.”
  
  A handful of guys using box-cutters started a multi-trillion dollar war. If you can think of a more cost effective way to get money from the state I’d like to hear it.
gwailo_joe

OK. . .I know nothing. No argument there. I do not know the inner workings of top level governmental agencies in ANY country, much less my own. (except what the airwaves, cable wire and newsprint tell me, but the media is so compromised that even if THEY knew the secret workings; they couldn’t inform John Q. Public for fear of reprisals from the lofty towers of power and wealth. Much less the task of simplifying and sound-biting intricate political complexities so your average taxpayer will understand it and care past a few weeks.)

At any rate: one thing is sure. IF (and it’s one Revolution-sized if) there is concrete evidence from these Wikileaks that bin Ladin was in contact with, or an asset of, the US Government. . .Wow.

That would indeed throw up a maelstrom of shit. And I for one would be damn interested to see it go down.

But I don’t buy it.

OK, Castro has his people get down to the business of translating and correlating and sifting through unimaginable mountains of memos and jargon. And turning those 10,000 documents into a concise easy-to-read breakdown of ‘the stuff that really matters’ for the big-shots to mull over. I’m sure Castro has the people power to make that happen; but I just have a vision of his main advisors and handlers flipping through the pertinents and assuring him ‘First Secretary, those Americanos are crazy! It’s worse than we thought!!!. . .’

For let’s face the facts: Fidel Castro is a feeble old man, and even if his faculties are first rate: I imagine he likely gets most of his news from the people around him, and I imagine anyone with any longevity in the halls of power in Havana knows not to rile Raul or befuddle Fidel. . .’Stick to the Party Line, or else!’

And I’m no Castro hater; in fact I give a hell of a lot of credit to a guy who has run an entire land his way, thumbing his nose at the mighty US, right in its’ backyard. . .since the Eisenhower administration!!!

(but while helping the poor by nationalizing health care and education seems like a pretty good idea to me: Many folks died real bad to make his collectivist reality. . .)

At any rate! (my, this comment is getting long. . .) my final point is simply: I do not believe that Osama bin Laden has (consciously) been an asset of the United States ever since Desert Shield; when the Saudis invited US troops in-country. That guy is really not happy with the West at all: I just can’t imagine that he would act (or refrain from acting) in any manner that would benefit the US.

Fucking up [our freedoms/our meddling, you choose] is his reason for being: the guy has been actively instigating and killing people for 30+ years. . .Would he take money from some imaginary secret US proxy to ‘please not blow up our pipelines!’. . .I guess so: but he’d just take that money and blow something ELSE up with it. Why even try to deal with a guy like that?

Bin Ladin is a jerk. He’s a cranky old fuck who wants to curtail the growth of the Muslim world because he doesn’t like change; and the only way he knows how to do it is by murdering people.

Taliban, same. They don’t realize it’s futile to try and stop progress just because you don’t like certain parts of it (can’t stop it anyway); so fuck those guys. And I like Muslims: my parents were Sufis, been to many a mosque in Istanbul. . .I respect the culture and even though I may not agree with all of it: I gotta live and let live . . .but these extremist guys; Not. Good. Muslims.

And my own Gummint is totally culpable in all sorts of nefarious plots and dire stratagems. . .Sure I remember when bin Laden “died” for about 6 months: the press said his video was a fake. Six months later “wait! It’s him!”: I remember thinking ‘well damn that’s the same damn dude by a cave video we saw last year: what’s up with that?’ For sure the Bush Administration played their terror cards close to the vest and laid them down perfectly to elicit maximum response. I am well aware that the Government is often times not my friend. Yet I participate in it, vote, pay my taxes and parking tickets. . .”My country right or wrong”? No way. But while the game may be rigged: it’s the only game in town.

I still feel that most of the wrong we do is more from incompetence, greed and selfishness rather than malice aforethought. . .tho’ in the end it seems to amount to pretty much the same thing.

Wow. That took a long time to write. But I wanted to respond to you Trotsky; as your comments are well written and your freestyle rhyming is better than mine: so in the spirit of calm political discourse; “don’t flame me bro!”

Good lord. It’s 5:30 Saturday morning. oog. Well that’s one way to sober up! cheers!

Anonymous

Are you sure hes Lithuanian :\? He doesn’t look like one and hes name and surname ain’t Lithuanian sounding. I bet he can’t even speak Lithuanian. Kas per oÅ¾ys…

W. James Au

Play him off, crazy keyboard cat!

Trotsky

Your comment thread shtick on BB thus far seems to consist primarily of disparaging single sentence drive-bys where you make the cuckoo gesture and reference foil hats.

Is that as good as it gets?

Anonymous

To me that looks like Salman Rushdie meeting Christopher Lee while the guy who played Mola Ram in Temple of Doom watches. Don’t be misled, people.

W. James Au

You’re right, Trotsky, I should follow your example and devote myself FULL TIME to undermining the hegemony by posting obscure anonymous posts in the comment threads of a geek blog with the pseudonym of a violent ideologue fuckwit who was only slightly better than the shitheads who put an icepick through his skull. Keep posting, cupcake, you’re only one or two comments away from bringing the whole thing down around their ankles. COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM!

Trotsky

A lot of frosting, no cake.

The all caps was a nice touch.
- Anonymous
  
  Brevity is the Soul of Wit.

rxbbx

New movie…?

Trotsky

This is probably too esoteric and a bit enervating for those who would rather spend their time researching the armor vulnerabilities of epic mounts or baking cookies fashioned after characters from Lost, but this blog purportedly features the direct remarks of Castro, unfiltered, parsed, or packaged by the sorry caste of low rent automatons we kindly refer to as journalists in the West.

http://monthlyreview.org/castro/

See if you can choke down a few entries, beginning to end. Eat all of your peas and carrots, kids.

The senile, old lunatic sounds far more lucid, and well-read than those who have disparaged his mental state on this thread and certainly carries more pith than the primary color, middle school mewlings of Newsweek or “Reason,” whatever the fuck that is.

Trotsky

Again, it is PURPORTEDLY the blog of Castro. I have no way of verifying it.

It certainly is a cut above the usual dreck.

Anonymous

Well it has been widely reported that we financed and trained bin Laden’s team to fight guerrilla warfare against the Russians in Afghanistan. Did he turn on us or did we turn on him or was he always just playing his role .. we’ll never know will we?

It has always been a curious detail that on 9/11 when all planes were grounded .. the bin Laden family were secreted out of the States in a hurry – no explanation ever given for this.

The events of 9/11 have never fully been dealt with in an honest manner .. some of the facts have never made sense .. and yet the nation has agreed not to delve but to move-on.

Count me as someone whose not convinced by the 9/11 Commission’s report. There is much more to this event than we’ll ever know at least in our lifetime – hopefully future generations will be able to uncover and learn from it.

nerak

At least he’s up with the times, plaid is DEFINITELY in this season. Hollister? American Eagle? So stylish, comrade.

arkizzle / Moderator

Trotsky, I reckon your first long comment could have been made more convincingly in just those last three sentences.

“Likely, Castro understands the US better than all but a handful of Americans. Don’t be so quick to dismiss his remarks with knee-jerk snarkery.

You know nothing.”

And, W James Au: zing! :)

Trotsky

>> Trotsky, I reckon your first long comment could have been made more convincingly in just those last three sentences.

Or one…

“Horse Hockey!”

Or alternately…

“Castro bad.”

Or…

“Cuckoo!”

Is that what BB is after?
- querent
  
  when ark gives you shit, you’re likely on the right direction.

Anonymous

Not impressed with the Guardian article. I understood that it was pretty much established that OBL was a CIA asset from ’79 – ’89 and his codename was “Tim Osmond”.

Also, I’ve been very impressed with Daniel Estulin’s research into the anual Bilderberg meetings. Castro knows first hand what the CIA is capable of and therefor is probably open to Estulin’s research.

“Conspiracy Theorist” is almost a swear word these days attributed to any alternative thinker who refuses to automatically accept the Government story.

There’s a lot going on below the surface if you are willing to research beyond what the mainstream media tells us.

for instance, Osama Bin Laden is NOT wanted by the FBI for 9/11 because according to them there is insufficient evidence linking him to the attacks.

michael holloway

I guess I’d better read the 77,000 documents like Fidel did – and help fix this planet.

I’ll give him this, they’re all good ideas.

jjsaul

Sometimes the elderly confuse current events with their younger years. He’s probably thinking of Operation Northwoods. Or maybe mixing Bin Ladin up with Orlando Bosch.

But wasn’t Castro in an irreversible coma a few years back? The man has more lives than a cat, and is harder to kill than Rasputin.

Wait a second. RasPUTIN?!?! Could Putin be Rasputin? Holy monksballs!

Anonymous

The government’s official story of what happened on 9/11 is… wait for it… a conspiracy theory!

Anyone who cannot comprehend this is incapable of understanding anything more complex than a grocery list.

Would the people insisting that 9/11 was not a conspiracy please tell me what the fuck they think it was? I have not heard one single explanation from anyone that did not involve a conspiracy.

Cognitive dissonance, or too terror stricken to think at all?

Xopher

And us non-bozos know that not every house that is white is the White House. Similarly, ‘conspiracy theory’ is a set phrase that means more than a theory about a conspiracy. And you know just what the extra meaning is.

Anonymous

Was the invasion of Iraq a “grand conspiracy” or was it just that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”?

Now please, which would be a bigger conspiracy, organizing the 911 attacks or organizing the Iraq War?

sapere_aude

The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

The invasion of Iraq was not a conspiracy. The neocons made no secret of the fact that they wanted to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power — they’d been talking about it to anyone who would listen for the better part of a decade. The Iraq invasion would have happened before Bush left the White House with or without 9/11. The 9/11 attacks just created a convenient excuse to do it sooner rather than later.

One question that has often been raised by debunkers that the 9/11 “truthers” have never managed to adequately answer: If the Bush administration was able to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks and cover up the evidence afterward (which would have to have been the biggest, most complex, and most successful conspiracy in history), then why were they not able to plant WMDs in Iraq for the weapons inspectors to find, so it would look like the invasion had been justified? If the Bushies were capable of pulling off 9/11, then they were certainly more than capable of covering their asses in Iraq. But they didn’t. In fact, every bit of evidence seems to suggest that the Bush administration was the most incompetent administration in American history. The war they wanted so badly was botched almost from the start. So, are we seriously supposed to believe that the Keystone Kops in the Bush White House were able to successfully pull off something as complex as secretly orchestrating the 9/11 attacks and covering up the evidence? Anyone who believes that George W. Bush was behind 9/11 has to have a lot more respect for his intelligence than I’ll ever have.
- iceman
  
  And nobody is saying Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, just like Obama isn’t to blame for the economic crisis even though its happening now..the 9/11 plans were in place along time before Bush took office.
  
  I’m sure most thoughtful and intelligent people can work that out.
- Trotsky
  
  >> The invasion of Iraq was not a conspiracy.
  
  Credibility gone.
- Anonymous
  
  Thank you for your reply, which I find very interesting (simply to hear another perspective on this).
  
  If I may ask a follow-up question, given that the invasion of Iraq was unilateral (it was not authorized by the UN security Council), some have argued that it violated US law and international law because it violated the UN charter (Article 2(4)), do you personally feel that the invasion of Iraq was legal? If so, what was the legal basis?
  - sapere_aude
    
    @Anon #78: I originally composed a long, in-depth, and nuanced answer to your question; but then decided that this, much simpler answer would do better:
    
    Personally, I think the Iraq war was the wrong thing to do: It was bad foreign policy. It was an unjust war (under the principles of “just war theory”). And it certainly violated the fundamental principles of international law. But I can’t say for sure whether or not it was, strictly speaking, a willful violation of the UN Charter. Defenders of the war have always argued that the UN resolutions mandating the disarmament of Iraq authorized the use of force if Iraq refused to comply. They argue that this provided all the authorization that the US and its “coalition of the willing” needed to go to war in Iraq. Therefore, the war was not a violation of the UN Charter. Critics contend that the UN resolutions that authorized force against Iraq were never intended to authorize a full-scale invasion to force regime change without explicit Security Council approval. I tend to agree with the critics. However, until there is an official ruling on the matter by the US Supreme Court, the International Court of Justice (World Court), or the UN Security Council, the question of legality is still up in the air. So, bottom line: Unjust? Definitely. Illegal? Probably; though the jury is still out. Questions of legality are notoriously tricky; and something can be totally unjust and yet perfectly legal, or vice versa.
    - Anonymous
      
      But the evidence for WMDs was faked. We know that now. A crime has quite obviously been committed here. And the Iraq war was also certainly the result of a secret plan by high members of government with obvious and known financial motivations for doing so. Why is this even being debated?
    - Trotsky
      
      >> Why is this even being debated?
      
      It’s not.
      
      Except in the solipsistic gyre of the apologist mind.
      
      Anyone who suggests that the invasion of Iraq was not, and is not a conspiracy is either misinformed or dishonest. I will give sapere_aude the benefit of the doubt and assume it is the latter.
- iceman
  
  “The Iraq invasion would have happened before Bush left the White House with or without 9/11″
  
  Credibility never coming back.

sapere_aude

@Anon #64 & Trotsky: The point you’re both missing is that the plan to invade Iraq was never a secret. The neocons were very publicly arguing for an invasion of Iraq for nearly a decade prior to the actual invasion. As soon as Bush got elected and brought a bunch of neocons with him to the White House, it was obvious that they were going to invade Iraq. Anyone who was even remotely paying attention to what was going on could have seen that. Rumsfeld was drawing up plans for an invasion of Iraq in the months before 9/11. After 9/11, he was upset that he had to go to war in Afghanistan before he could invade Iraq — he saw the war in Afghanistan as a distraction from his ultimate goal of war in Iraq. (In fact, he tried his best to argue for blaming Saddam Hussein instead of Osama bin Laden for 9/11 so he could immediately launch attacks against Iraq instead of Afghanistan.) Neocons were writing op-eds and going on TV to make a case for why we ought to remove Saddam from power. They never tried to hide their desire to invade Iraq. In order for something to be considered a “conspiracy” there has to be at least some attempt to keep your goals and motives a secret.

I’m not suggesting that everyone involved was perfectly honest about what they were planning and why, or that there was no deception (this is politics after all); but the neoconservatives never hid their desire to go to war in Iraq. In fact, they were extremely vocal about it. If someone tells you that they’re going to do something, and then they actually do it, that’s not a conspiracy!

The war in Iraq was unjust, and it was probably illegal under international law (though, as I mentioned earlier, there hasn’t been an official ruling yet on its legality). The war was “sold” to the US Congress, to the American people, and to the world, on false pretenses. There was dishonesty. There was distortion. There was manipulation. There were lots of shady things going on. I would argue that there was an abuse of power at the highest level. Crimes were almost certainly committed (e.g. the “outing” of Valerie Plame and efforts to cover that up). And this is just in the lead-up to the war. Don’t even get me started on the war crimes that were committed after the war began! But the ultimate goal of going to war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power was never a secret.

When I say that the war in Iraq was not a “conspiracy” I don’t mean to suggest that there were no “petty conspiracies” involved in the planning or execution of the war. In fact, there were many. There was a conspiracy to distort and manipulate intelligence. There was a conspiracy against Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. There was a conspiracy to set up secret prisons where captured terror suspects were tortured. These were certainly conspiracies, in the legal sense of the word. But they were “petty conspiracies”. They don’t rise to the level of a “grand conspiracy” in which a shadowy cabal of plotters secretly orchestrates some major world event (e.g. the 9/11 attacks, the Kennedy assassination) for nefarious purposes, and is able to cover up all evidence of its involvement, making it look as if someone else was to blame. The Iraq war was not the result of a “grand conspiracy”. We knew all along who was behind the plan to invade Iraq; and they were quite open about it.

Antinous / Moderator

The neocons were very publicly arguing for an invasion of Iraq for nearly a decade prior to the actual invasion.

Um…a decade before the invasion of Iraq, we were…invading Iraq. More than 500K troops, $60 billion, 100K Iraqi civilians killed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
- sapere_aude
  
  The Iraq war began in 2003. A decade before that would have been 1993. The first Gulf War ended in 1991. Neocons argued even then that we should have gone on to Baghdad and removed Saddam from power instead of just pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait, declaring victory, and going home.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Now you’re just being a fussbudget.
Trotsky

>> The point you’re both missing is that the plan to invade Iraq was never a secret.

You’re just amusing yourself with a ball of semantics like a bored kitten on a lazy summer afternoon.
- Anonymous
  
  I believe what you are looking for is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Specifically their report on Rebuilding America’s Defenses.
  
  http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
  
  Look at the Four Core Missions section of that document
  
  -”fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;”
  
  Now look at the strategy laid out to complete those missions….
  
  Now look at the list of founders…
  http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
  
  Jeb Bush
  Dick Cheney
  Donald Rumsfeld
  Paul Wolfowitz
  Scooter Libby

Anonymous

Castro can continue to keep his mouth shut. With all the US Presidents that have been assassinated, why haven’t They never tried to take out Castro that alone is pretty fishy. As for these Wiki leaks. The Site is now down. I say thumbs up for the brains that got around the “Elite” to spill all this proof. Good for you! Or is this simply another decoy to start another war?

Nice move they did by threatening students that post information on the wiki leaks on Facebook. look it up. Keep up the great job, screwing our economy over and then wiping your hands on it like they always do. Making excuses. BP fucked our waters. Why is the gas so high? If we think about this really good we have no one to blame but the government for the way things are today

threewickets

Nothing undermines the credibility of progressives more than truthers…in this liberal’s opinion. Nothing comes close.

AnnaMossity

Then would you ALSO agree that nothing undermines the credibility of Conservatives than The BIRTHERS? I would!
sapere_aude

I’ve never really understood why the so-called 9/11 “truthers” have been identified with “progressives” or “liberals”. I would define a “progressive” as someone who wants to build a more inclusive and egalitarian society, and a “liberal” as someone who wants to prevent the abuse or arbitrary exercise of power in order to safeguard the rights and liberties of the people. But what does any of that have to do with holding irrational and paranoid views about the 9/11 attacks? If anything, the “truthers” strike me as “radicals” rather than progressives or liberals. I would define a “radical” as someone who believes that the system is corrupt to the core and ought to be uprooted.

I guess it’s just because, in the hyper-polarized political environment of the post-9/11 era, everyone gets lumped into one of two bins: left or right, liberal or conservative, Bush supporters or Bush critics, patriots or traitors, “with us” or “against us”. There seems to be no room for nuance anymore. So, the “truthers” and other radicals get lumped together with progressives and liberals, because all of them are critics of the Bush administration.

But that’s utterly absurd. I was (and remain) a critic of the Bush administration. I’m a Democrat and an Obama supporter. I consider myself a pragmatic liberal, and would place myself on the center-left of the ideological spectrum. So, according to the “two bin” system, I belong in the same bin as the “truthers” and radical leftists. But, in reality, I have more in common with moderate Republicans on the center-right than I have with radicals on the far left. And I know there are a lot of moderate Republicans on the center-right who have no desire to be put in the same bin as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. The “two bin” approach to ideology is just stupid; and the quicker we abandon it, the better.
- iceman
  
  I agree with your comments to dismiss generalizations of a left/right paradigm but you yourself have just generalized and labeled truthers as irrational and radical people.
  
  Some are probably paranoid as Americans do live in a country of 850,000 spooks don’t forget, but the majority are probably just curious and have looked at ALL the evidence.
  - sapere_aude
    
    I’m sure that the “true believers” in every conspiracy theory and pseudoscientific claim — whether it’s about the moon landing, the JFK assassination, the “New World Order”, President Obama’s birth certificate, “climategate”, UFOs, homeopathy, vaccines, “Intelligent Design”, or whatever — would make the very same claim: that they’re just concerned citizens who have done their due diligence by examining all the available evidence, and have come to the only logical conclusion. Horse hockey! It’s delusional thinking, pure and simple. What’s worse, it’s willful delusional thinking: These people are not mentally ill (at least most of them aren’t). They are simply people who are deliberately deluding themselves as a means of coping with an existential crisis.
    
    We now live in a world in which those in authority — scientists, politicians, business leaders — seem to have all the answers, but problems never seem to get solved. We live in a world that can put a man on the moon but can’t cure common illnesses. We live in a world that has the technological and industrial capacity to produce just about anything we can imagine, yet billions around the world still live in abject poverty. We live in a world in which a few men armed with nothing but boxcutters and balls can deliver a devastating blow to the most powerful nation on the planet; and yet that nation, with all of its military might, can’t seem to defeat a relatively small group of terrorists after nearly a decade of war. We live in a world in which the most powerful and most well-protected man on the planet can be killed by a lone gunman whose true motives will never be known; yet the most sophisticated spy agency in the world can’t seem to bump off the troublemaking petty dictator of a small, impoverished island nation, even after repeated attempts. We live in a world in which science claims that it can explain how the universe works without any need for belief in God; yet the scientific explanation relies on things like “dark matter”, “string theory”, and “quantum indeterminacy”, that no one seems to really understand, but we’re supposed to accept as legitimate because the scientists tell us that their equations predict these things. Let’s face it: the world doesn’t make much sense to a lot of people. And so, these people have a choice: Embrace conspiracy theories and pseudoscience in a desperate attempt to make sense of the world, or else lapse into nihilism and existential angst. It’s understandable why they would choose the former. But that doesn’t mean that they’re right, or that anyone ought to treat their beliefs as credible.
    - Trotsky
      
      >> I’m sure that the “true believers” in every conspiracy theory and pseudoscientific claim — whether it’s about the moon landing, the JFK assassination, the “New World Order”, President Obama’s birth certificate, “climategate”, UFOs, homeopathy, vaccines, “Intelligent Design”, or whatever — would make the very same claim: that they’re just concerned citizens who have done their due diligence by examining all the available evidence, and have come to the only logical conclusion. Horse hockey!
      
      This is a shameful, lazy, and dishonest characterization using random guilt-by-association (“UFOs!”) of individuals who question official narrative. Compare the entirely subjective, insubstantial rambling of your post to that of Tatsuma’s at #45, which is the polar opposite: succinct, germane, entirely objective, meticulously sourced, and crafted into an easy to follow timeline.
      
      Why is he considered insane while you are not?
- brix
  
  remind me again what’s radical about conspiracy theories?
  
  i’d agree with the definition of radical to a point…
  “radical” as in “going to the root,”
  
  as in “the political/economic/sociocultural problems we experience are not symptomatic of a Broken System to be reformed and fixed. they’re the predictable outcomes of system that is working properly.”
  
  any worthwhile systemic analysis is radical.
  
  conspiracy hobbyists (not theorists. theories are testable and verifiable/disprovable), by contrast, seem to think that Everything That Ever Goes Wrong happens because a Fundamentally Sound System has been seized by a Secret Cadre Of Powerful People Who Do Secret Things.
  
  and whereas systemic (radical) analysis might provide suggestions of how to restructure a system to function differently, conspiracists never really get beyond the idea that The Bad People should be Identified And Removed, so that Better People might be put in charge.
  
  which always struck me as an attempt to make the machinations of electoral democracy sound like the plot to an action movie.
  - sapere_aude
    
    I don’t think that the conspiracy “hobbyists” (excellent term, by the way) really do believe that we have a fundamentally sound system that simply has bad people at the top. They may believe that the system was fundamentally sound at some point in the past — perhaps the very distant past — but I don’t think they would consider it sound anymore. Whether it’s the 9/11 attacks, the JFK assassination, the “New World Order”, the moon landing, or whatever, if you believe that these things are government conspiracies, then you have to believe that these conspiracies go really deep. It couldn’t just be a few bad apples at the top. It would have to involve the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, NASA — hundreds, perhaps thousands of people throughout the government. Plus, there would have to be ties between the conspirators within the government and conspirators outside the government: at the UN, in the Mafia, in big business, etc. I think that if you really believed that the conspiracy ran that deep, you would never be satisfied with a little house cleaning — you’d want to burn the house down, just to be sure. In my book, that’s radical.
    - brix
      
      i suppose it depends on whether you’re a “last 5000 years have been manipulated by the illuminati/freemasonry” hobbyist or a “9/11 was an inside job” hobbyist (jobbyist?).
      
      whether they think the world was perfect up until JFK had already escalated the Vietnam war and almost started World War 3, or whether they think the world was perfect until after the US had invaded-and-then-spent-ten-years-carpetbombing iraq the first time, or whether they think a secret masonic/jewish/illuminatus/satanic/bolshevic cabal has been running the show since before the invention of the loin cloth…
      
      there never seems to be any substantive critique of the structure (and the function which flows therefrom) in conspiracist thinking. just the vague idea that there’s some occam’s-razor-proof secret hideout within that structure, where all the REAL bad things happen.
      
      which carries with it the idea that the readily apparent bad things aren’t really worth addressing or exploring or stopping. at least not through the pedestrian means of, y’know, addressing and confronting and stopping them.
      
      so point 1: conspiracism is dumb, because the people who do bad shit love to talk about the bad shit they do, out in public. as opposed to conspiracists, who love to talk loudly, and in public, about their own pet scenario where Bad People In Secret Want To Keep The Truth Silent.
      
      and point 2: i don’t think “radical” ought to be conflated with “angry and dumb and loud.” maybe it’s just bein’ a kid who grew up with the Ninja Turtles and anarcho-punk.
      
      by that logic, glenn beck, 9/11 truthers, the jersey shore cast, neo-nazis, kanye, the Spartacists, and that dude in front of you in line who can never figure out how to use the ATM all fall into the same political category. which makes me think the category might not be super useful.
      
      (not that i think “liberal” or “progressive” are real helpful as political terms either. but then, no ninja-victory or pizza topping was ever declared to be “Liberal!” or “Progressive!” in my childhood. just car insurance and elected politicians family friends who drove volvos.)

Xopher

I think Castro was behind 9/11, which is why he’s saying this stuff now. He got the 19 Saudis to cooperate by promising them the Ark of the Covenant, or maybe the Holy Grail (my sources conflict on the issue of payment). He forced the US to fake the moon landing too, by making a secret side deal with Ming of Mongo to make actual space flight unsafe for Americans.

Why would he do this? To bring the US into disrepute, of course! Look what international pariahs we’ve become since Bush/Cheney! It clearly worked.

Oh, and I just made all that stuff up. But if I put it up on a serious (looking) website and said “I’ve obtained documents that say” and “my sources tell me” about all of it, I bet I could have a couple of thousand internet fucktards believing it and spreading it and citing “sources” that are all each other, and ultimately lead back to my website…which I would then remove, leaving the rumors to float on their own.

Anonymous

Julian Assange made the remark that 9/11 truthers annoyed him.

Doesn’t add up to me that he would be making remarks like that and then releasing secret documents that lend credence to the 9/11 truthers’ claims.

Documents that suggest that bin Laden wasn’t caught when that was possible only suggest that somebody didn’t want to catch him, not that he’s a bought-an-paid-for asset.

There are plenty of money and power reasons to want endless war.

Anonymous

This doesn’t make any sense.

Which truthers? People who tell you what the truth is (whichever conspiracy is their cup of tea) or people that just want the “truth” because there are definitely unanswered questions?

Unmutual

Bin Laden as a CIA spy is quite frankly one of the more restrained conspiracy theories out there.

I had a guy on Facebook try and explain to me how “chemtrails” are the NWO government spraying aluminum particles to reflect light from low earth orbit back into space, in order to mask a gargantuan fleet of extra terrestrial space craft that has been stationed at earth for the past decade or so.

Anonymous

Google: “osama bin laden early training” and conclude that the CIA (US taxpayers) built this monster.

Anonymous

Why is this so hard to buy? You guys have heard of Arbusto, right? Also, look up “false flag” while you’re at it.

iceman

its funny how the guardian mentions a plot with an exploding cigar but fails to mention Operation Northwoods.

“The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America’s top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and, “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” – from abc news

This gives an idea of the some of the crazies that run the pentagon and don’t forget it’s only the stuff that gets out after 30-40 years.

sapere_aude

@Trotsky: I called it “horse hockey” because that’s what it is. The 9/11 “truther” movement (much like the “birther” movement) is absurd on its face, and ought to be dismissed out of hand — and as rudely as possible — rather than seriously debated. I would no more enter into a reasoned debate with 9/11 “truthers” than I would enter into a reasoned debate with members of the Flat Earth Society; because people who insist on holding these sorts of nonsense views can’t be reasoned with; and engaging them in serious debate only serves to reinforce the misperception that these views have some credibility to them.

When an idea is first proposed, people ought to take it seriously as long as it sounds even remotely plausible; and they ought to look into it and see if there is any validity to it. But, once they have examined it and discovered that it doesn’t hold water, they need to move on to something else. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to keep revisiting ideas that have been discarded as worthless. The quest for truth requires that we be willing to reject ideas that don’t work, and simply move on. If we’re forced to keep debating old, discarded ideas all the time, we won’t have time to fully examine new, untested ideas to see where they lead us. Progress demands that we be willing to say, “enough is enough” to old ideas that have been discredited, and move on without looking back. You wouldn’t expect a modern astronomer to feel obligated to defend heliocentrism against those who insist that the Ptolemaic model of the solar system is correct; nor would you expect physicians to feel obligated to defend the germ theory of disease against those who think that all disease is caused by a misalignment of the spine or poor diet. At some point, the judge’s gavel has to come down, and a verdict has to be pronounced: Either you’ve made your case beyond a reasonable doubt, or you have failed to do so. If you have failed to do so, you’ve lost your case, and we move on.

Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the so-called 9/11 “truthers” have not been able to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. All they’ve been able to do is amass a bunch of purely circumstantial evidence (like Tatsuma does above) that doesn’t really prove anything, and wouldn’t hold up in a court of law. (The only difference between the “truthers” and the “birthers” is that the “birthers” have actually taken their case to court — which was truly hi-larious. Maybe if the “truthers” hired Orly Taitz to represent them they’d get the respect they deserve.) Most elements of the 9/11 conspiracy theory have already been thoroughly debunked. If you haven’t been convinced by the arguments of the debunkers, then there’s nothing I can say that will convince you; so why should I waste my time trying?

Why do I lump the 9/11 “truthers” together with other conspiracy nuts? For one thing, research has shown that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are very likely to believe in other conspiracy theories. This same research has shown a strong correlation between belief in conspiracy theories and feelings of alienation and anomie, and distrust of those in authority. So, basically, people who feel that the system doesn’t work for them are more likely to embrace conspiracy theories as an explanation for why they are being screwed by the system. As I said in my earlier post, belief in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience is a coping mechanism for dealing with the existential angst caused by living in a frightening world that often doesn’t make sense and doesn’t really seem fair. I feel sorry for people who believe in conspiracy theories; but I’m not going to lend credence to their nonsensical worldview by engaging them in a serious debate.

@Anon #66: Of course there are conspiracies in the world. Conspiracy is simply the act of two or more people planning something (usually a crime) in secret. If a gang of would-be bank robbers meets at their hideout to plan their robbery in advance, they are committing the crime of “conspiracy”. If a group of friends gets together in secret to plan a surprise birthday party for another friend, that is a sort of conspiracy, too (though not a criminal one). Conspiracies do happen; and, obviously, the 9/11 attacks were the result of a conspiracy: The terrorists conspired to commit this horrendous crime. But there’s a big difference between the sort of “petty conspiracies” that criminals engage in all the time, and the “grand conspiracies” that conspiracy theorists fantasize about. These grand conspiracies propose that the entire world is being deliberately deceived by the powers that be, who are colluding with each other to advance some nefarious secret agenda, and that lots of people — in government, business, organized crime, etc. — are “in on it”. These sorts of grand conspiracies make for great entertainment in spy novels and action movies; but they are very poor explanations for major world events like the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, or 9/11

threewickets

Maybe truthers have loud voices, but they are present and accounted for on most of the mainstream progressive blogs. I would define “progressives” as liberals who campaigned for our current President and took on that label…because in 2000 and 2004, the only self identified progressives were Naderites and frankly I don’t recall race relations in the country being at the top of their agenda. Is the President a progressive. It’s hard to keep track.

Aloisius

Conspiracy theories like this require a large group of people working in the government to be competent. I rest my case.

jjsaul

Nah, you’re thinking of _successful_ conspiracies.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice remind me a little too much of Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman for me to think they were completely honest. Any conspiracy was probably foiled by their surrounding themselves with hapless goons as henchmen, rehiring all the old douchebags from Iran-Contra.

That said, I have no doubt that a plane hit the pentagon, since I have a highschool friend who was in the pentagon at the time, and saw the mangled human remains still burning in airliner seats.
SpaceGhost

Actually this conspiracy only requires a few people who are trusted by others in the government. The effect was massive but the execution was small. How many people did it take to make 9/11 happen? Someone with the idea of domestic terrorist attack to start a war, another who can find someone to play the role of the terrorist, and assurance that his activities can be financed so as to be effective. You could fit all those guys in an elevator.

And as to how bin Laden could be protected from our military coming after him, assuming that Bush was the main facilitator of this conspiracy, who could communicate to bin Laden better and in secret as to where to stay out of sight than the commander in chief of the army that’s hunting him. That’s one guy, not hundreds trying to misdirect the rest who aren’t in on it.

The whole somebody would have seen/heard something and told us argument is flawed in that it assumes that so many people are needed to make something like this work.

Tatsuma

1. 1991-1997 – Major U.S. oil companies including ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell and Enron directly invest billions in cash bribing heads of state in Kazakhstan to secure equity rights in the huge oil reserves in these regions. The oil companies further commit to future direct investments in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. Not being willing to pay exorbitant prices to Russia to use Russian pipelines, the major oil companies have no way to recoup their investments. [Source: "The Price of Oil" by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, July 9, 2001 - The Asia Times, "The Roving Eye Part I Jan. 26, 2002.]

2. January 1995 – Philippine police investigating a possible attack on the Pope uncover plans for Operation Bojinka, connected to World Trade Center (WTC) bomber Ramsi Youssef. Parts of the plan call for crashing hijacked airliners into civilian targets. Details of the plan are disclosed in Youssef’s 1997 trial for the 1993 WTC bombing. [Source: Agence France-Presse, Dec. 7, 2001]

3. Dec. 4, 1997 – Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Subsequent reports will indicate that the negotiations failed, allegedly because the Taliban wanted too much money. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4, 1997]

4. Feb. 12, 1998 – Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca — later to become a special ambassador to Afghanistan — testifies before the House that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan, the trans-Afghani pipeline needed to monetize the oil will not be built. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee: http://www.house.gov/international_relations/105th/ap/wsap212982.htm

5. August 1998 - After the U.S. cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in retaliation for the African embassy bombings, Unocal officially withdraws from participation in the CentGas trans-Afghani gas pipeline project. [Various sources, Unocal]

6. 1998 – The CIA ignores warnings from Case Officer Robert Baer that Saudi Arabia was harboring an Al Qaeda cell led by two known terrorists. A more detailed list of known terrorists is offered to Saudi intelligence in August 2001 and refused. [Source: Financial Times Jan. 21, 2001; "See No Evil" by Robert Baer (release date February 2002)]

7. April 1999 – Enron with a $3 billion investment to build an electrical generating plant at Dabhol, India loses access to plentiful LNG supplies from Qatar to fuel the plant. Its only remaining option to make the investment profitable is a trans-Afghani gas pipeline to be built by Unocal from Turkmenistan that would terminate near the Indian border at the city of Multan. [Source: The Albion Monitor, Feb. 28, 2002]

8. July 4, 1999 – President Clinton signs Executive Order 13129, which freezes Taliban assets in the U.S. and prohibits trade between the Afghan fundamentalist regime and U.S. entities. [Source: Federal Register, Vol. 64, No. 129, July 7, 1999]

9. 1998 and 2000 – Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the U.S. While there he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. [Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2001. See also FTW, Vol. IV, No. 7 - "The Best Enemies Money Can Buy"
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/carlyle.html

10. March 2000 - An FBI agent, reportedly angry over a glitch in Carnivore that has somehow mixed innocent non-targeted emails with those belonging to Al Qaeda, destroys all of the FBI's Denver-based intercepts of bin Laden's colleagues in a terrorist investigation. [Source: The Washington Post, May 29, 2002]

11. 2000 (est.) – The FBI refuses to disclose the date of an internal memo stating that a Middle Eastern nation had been trying to purchase a flight simulator. [Source: Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2002]

12. August 2000 — Suspected Al Qaeda operatives wiretapped by Italian police made apparent references to plans for major attacks involving airports, airplanes and the United States according to transcripts obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The Times suggests that the information might not have been passed to U.S. authorities (hard to believe), but it did report that Italian authorities would not comment on the report. The Times also noted that “Italian and U.S. anti-terrorism experts cooperate closely.” [Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2002]

13. Oct. 24-26, 2000 – Pentagon officials carry out a “detailed” emergency drill based upon the crashing of a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon. [Source: The Mirror, May 24, 2002]

threewickets

They’re here…

iceman

and the sand is on the beach 3wickets, could i recommend a full body rather than just a head massage?

@spaceghost Some think 9/11 couldn’t have been a conspiracy because something so complex couldn’t have been kept secret. Operation Northwoods had a similar danger of leaks but all Joint Chiefs of Staff approved that conspiracy.

Conspiracies to overthrow governments are as old as governments themselves, with the US involved in dozens this century alone.

America has sadly become a bit of a joke.
- threewickets
  
  I’m not the one on the spaceship.
  
  Real conspiracies exist in every facet of our society. The trick to rooting them out is putting the research ahead of the conclusion or the politics, and not the other way around. I’ve read more than a few truther theses, and not one has convinced me that the US government planned and executed the flight of multiple 767 heavies into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fields of PA. Just me.

threewickets

Atheism has consequencies, apparently. Why I choose to be agnostic.

Anonymous

Sibel Edmonds, Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI, says the Bin Ladin worked for US Intelligence right up until the day of 9/11.

She’s the most gagged person in US History and I’m betting everyone here who belittled people for being “conspiracy theorists” have never heard her name before this.

Fidel Castro believes Wikileaks documents prove Bin Laden is US spy

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