What if it’s a burgundy-colored jacket, hmm?  Wouldn’t that make you reconsider your stance?

I think they’re winning, effectively.

That’s what you want to hear, right?

Just an acknowledgement that state-sponsored murder and regular murder aren’t really much different.

I’m not here to defend one type of killing over another.  I can’t really point to a war that improved the human situation in my lifetime.

We have this phenomenon here where right-wing hate radio will identify a target and spend weeks warning that this person is destroying the nation.  Then a “crazed loner” acts on that information, and Nobody Could Have Predicted, and it has Nothing to Do with the Media.  Again and again.

EDIT: Woops! I misread your original comment. No, they are not admitting the problem isn’t real, you’re right. When confronted with the evidence there isn’t even a counterargument. They just bull their way forward.

Instead of taking the paltry loss of a couple of buildings and few thousand lives, something the US does basically on a regular basis between McDonalds and boring old weather related damage without flinching, we chopped our own arm off and decided to see how much damage we could REALLY do.  We fucked the airline industry, tourism, and pretty much all companies that rely on a steady supply of foreign labor.  We pissed away hundreds of billions on a shitty new bureaucracy that has the singular goal of doing as much economic damage as possible by screaming at the top of their lungs about how scary some goat herders are while shoveling money into the waste furnaces of the “security” industry.  We fucked whatever reputation we had, and stripped away liberties that we had had the balls to keep during the entire fucking Cold War against a REAL existential threat.  

We acted like a bunch of fucking cowards.  We pissed ourselves and did as much self inflicted damage as humanly possible.  Our cowards response inflicted multiple orders of magnitude more damaging on ourselves than anything the “scary” terrorist did.

There wasn’t any fucking judo.  A mosquito landed on our finger tip and we chopped the entire arm off.  The mosquito didn’t perform judo.  We just acted like dumb ass cowards.

I know you’re joking but what were half the IRA doing in San Fran?

In all seriousness, how can they not see the hypocrisy of their actions?

I always hear the excuse its “justifiable” murder, funny guess I have a different interpretation of the 10 commandments, especially that don’t kill one.

We give them too much credit by calling them “terrorists.” It acknowledges their motives in a way that unfortunately gives them credit. They’re just murderers.

So….just like soldiers?

And, from the viewpoint of the people financing it, it was a failure. Bin Laden spent years trying to spin it “spending $200k to make the US spend $2 trillion” as a victory, but his own followers were pointing out to him, some of them quite publicly, that when he asked for all that money, bin Laden promised them three things: the US out of the middle east, Israel out of Palestine, and a reunification of the Califate. Not only did it not achieve those goals, it cost them the Islamic Caliphate of Afghanistan.

The Bush the Younger administration did achieve one noticeable success that hasn’t been mentioned yet, in this discussion: forcing the ha-wallah Islamic banking network into something like the same anti-money-laundering regime that the rest of the banking system (at least in theory) has to work with. Even if terrorists could raise enough money for another 9/11, they’d have one heck of a time getting that money into the country.

It’s appalling to me how few Americans are willing to admit the truth: we actually won the war on terror less than three months after 9/11. But we keep thinking that these are super-villains with super-powers and vastly superior intelligence and perfect coordination, so we keep spending tens of billions of dollars a year looking for them. And the fact that we keep not finding them is taken, not as proof of our success, but as proof of their super-villainy.