Re: Runaway Global Warming Possible!

From: Vendicar Decarian (VD_at_Pyro.net)
Date: 02/13/05 

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 13:38:59 -0500

"Fred J. McCall" <fmccall@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:pa3t01pllv8fis9hafad6n5uuh9s3g2bei@4ax.com...
> "Vendicar Decarian" <VD@Pyro.net> wrote:
>
> :"Fred J. McCall" <fmccall@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> :news:3dl8011plslf7d7kfnnloc5u9i25sr0kbd@4ax.com...
> :> You don't read very well, do you?
> :
> : Oh, on the contrary. You are quite transparent.
>
> A pity you're not trying to read through me, then, because when it
> comes to understanding, you appear sufficiently dense to be totally
> opaque.

April 25, 2003

The Shock and Awe of American Ignorance
by WALT BRASCH
More than half of all Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally
involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to an Associated Press
poll conducted shortly after the conclusion of the successful invasion of
Iraq, 53 percent of the nation pin the 9/11 murders on Saddam, something the
CIA and most of the world intelligence gathering organizations have
consistently discounted.

The fact that so many Americans believe this reveals the successful drum
beating of the Bush administration along with a failure of both Congress and
the media to adequately question the President's motives or to challenge the
statements coming from the White House and Pentagon. President Bush and his
horde of advisors have constantly said they never--ever--said that Saddam
was the person behind the attacks. But, if the President could say
"subliminal," that's what he, the vice-president, and their administration
did to the Americans, with the complicity of the media who abrogated their
responsibilities and made it seem that challenging anything the President
said would be treason.

In message after message, the President referred to 9/11 and the war on
terrorism. Then, as in the movies, he jump-cut to the evils of Saddam,
letting the people think there was a smooth transition, while implanting
those "hidden" meanings.

A month after 9/11, Americans believed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were
responsible. Upon that basis, the President ordered an invasion of
Afghanistan, one of several countries that harbored bin Laden and his
terrorists, and overthrew the Taliban regime. At the time, finding anyone
who thought Saddam was personally involved in 9/11 was as rare as finding a
corporate executive who believed in unions.

Americans quickly learned that 15 of the 19 suicide/killers of 9/11 were
Saudi. With a little more digging into buried news accounts, they might have
also learned that 26 of al-Qaeda's top leadership at the time of 9/11,
including bin Laden, were Egyptian, Saudi, or Yemini. Only one, a third
level administrator, was an Iraqi. They might also have learned that eight
of the top 10 financial contributors to al-Qaeda are Saudi. They might also
have learned that Saddam and al-Qaeda had never been close, that as ruthless
as Saddam was, he was relatively moderate in the world of terrorism except,
of course, against his own people.

A year of Presidential drum beating and brow-bashing led to about a third of
Americans becoming believers. A month before the invasion of Iraq, about 45
percent of Americans, according to the AP, believed the Iraqi dictator was
personally involved.

The eight percent increase in the month after the invasion could be
attributed not only to war-mongering rhetoric, but to the nation trying to
justify why it sent more than 200,000 of its sons and daughters, mothers and
fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins to war.

By the time war had begun, the message wasn't that Iraq was behind 9/11, but
that it was a potential enemy because it had weapons of mass destruction.

In the most recent State of the Union, President Bush had forcefully
declared that Iraq had a weapons program that included at least 500 tons of
chemical weapons, 38,000 liters of botulism, 25,000 liters of anthrax, as
well as uncountable numbers of SCUDs. But, as in the telephone rumor game
when a simple fact spread person to person eventually becomes a bloated
urban myth, America's people and their news media escalated even those
unproven numbers until the average working person may have been led to
believe that Iraq actually posed a greater danger to America than did North
Korea and Iran, both of which had nuclear capability to hit American
targets, something Iraq did not have.

However, Iraq once had weapons of mass destruction, although none were
nuclear. Between 1983 and 1992--the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle era--the
U.S. gave Iraq innumerable weapons, and issued about $2 billion in loans,
most of which were used to buy even more weapons; the U.S. never expected
full repayment. In addition, U.S. corporations provided Iraq with the means
to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. The "point man" the Reagan
administration sent to solidify U.S.-Iraqi relations-and who had personal
knowledge that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran, and who helped
remove the "terrorist" label against Iraq--was . . . Donald Rumsfeld.

But, slowly and reluctantly under a U.N. mandate, Iraq began to destroy its
weapons. So far, 300,000 American and British combat forces, aided by
numerous infiltrators and the best spy satellite system ever known to
mankind, have been unable to locate any weapons of mass destruction--other
than ones used by the Coalition forces. Maybe the Bush administration should
send in Monk and Colombo.

The fact that the two-nation "coalition" of 300,000 overwhelmed and
destroyed a country of 24 million quickly, and that Iraq's armies used only
bullets, light artillery, and short-range, but legal, missiles in its
defense, suggests that the defeated nation probably didn't have the weapons
the U.S. claimed.

President Bush and his supporters kept saying the war wasn't about oil. But,
the first thing the Coalition troops protected once they entered Baghdad
weren't the hospitals or museums but the Oil Ministry. Maybe the Ministry
was in an "historical district."

At the time President Bush was telling the U.N. and the American people that
he had no plans to go to war with Iraq, his administration officials were
meeting in secret with several industry giants with financial and political
ties to the Administration to develop a plan for a post-war Iraq.

One of those giants was Bechtel, a multi-nation conglomerate with close
financial ties to the White House. Another was a subsidiary of Haliburton,
the multi-billion dollar oil company that once had Dick Cheney as its CEO.

In a few months, Americans may be shocked that Iraq didn't help al-Qaeda and
the 9/11 attacks, that it didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and that
there may have been collusion between the Administration and major
corporations to reap financial rewards for rebuilding a country that the
U.S. destroyed. We should be shocked--but we should also be in awe of how
well the President and his administration spun their messages of war, and
how dizzy the major media must have been to have accepted the words
unchallenged.

Walt Brasch

Relevant Pages

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