posted 12-16-2002 06:19 PM
I love a good debate, so "I'm Baaaack!" LOL But after today, I'm going back to lurker mode--this is too time consuming (albeit fun and educational). I'm putting Mech's comments in quotes but I don't know if that will work either. I still haven't figured out how to post properly, and I have no idea if my post will end up in italics. Be warned."Watch what you say. The USA Patriot Act and the Total Information Awareness/DARPA supercomputer is compiling information about EVERYTHING you do."
And who is analyzing this information? Try to follow the whereabouts and activities on a twenty-four hour basis of even one person in your life, and tell me that this is not a hugely time consuming task. Even if every email and every post on the internet on every webboard were somehow captured and stored in a computer and certain words were flagged, you'd still end up with about a zillion man hours to process the data. And then say, out of a billion emails, you flag two hundred million, who is going to go through the two hundred million to decide who is most dangerous to the government and who is not. Who is going to prosecute and on what basis when they decide that of the two hundred million suspects, forty million are potential "enemies of the state". What then? Do you try to investigate forty million people? What you are suggesting would take a society that is a lot more insular than the one we have now. It's still a lot easier to shoot yourself in the foot than it is to murder or set someone else up without getting caught.
DARPA worries me. I don't know of anybody that isn't concerned about this organization. But it's hard enough to keep secrets with just a handful of high security military personnel (Area 51 leaks), let alone try to set up a huge spy organization that makes enemies of the people it employs. Which isn't to say that this organization doesn't need to be watched, and if necessary, reigned in. How? I don't know but the fact that DARPA is so controversial is a good thing--they can't hide. They are a spy group who will be spied on.
"Al Qaida is a CIA created organization. i would go as far as to say they are still on the payroll. Try looking up..."THE CARLYLE GROUP" in a search engine. You will find that The Bushes have been doing buisnes with the Bin Ladens for years and years."
Al quaeda is not a CIA created organization. It's the spread of Wahabisim, wthich is a fundamentalist sect within Islam, that is the root of Al Quaeda. They are, just like the Christian Crusaders in the middle ages, on a quest to spread their religion to as many places as possible. Al quaeda terrorists have a religious agenda not a political or financial one. The fact that the CIA USED them for their own purposes during the Cold War to keep Russia at bay in Afghanistan, is common knowledge, but it doesn't change the facts--Saudi Arabia breeds these fanatics and they go out and spread the poison. The United States isn't the only country to use fanatics for it's own purposes, to do it's dirty work. Probably every country in existence has done it. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours "is hardly a new, American only policy.
"it has been stated that Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. The result of that one cost even more thousands of lives. The U.S. knew it wanted to drop the bomb and this was part of their excuse."
If you are talking about the "what really happened website, which reveals documents supporting the idea that the government under President Rossevelt deliberately provoked Japan into attacking us, yes, I believe it. Did our government know when or how this would happen? I doubt it. War is still a chess game--you can provoke but nobody knows for sure what, how, when the response will be.
But let's say it never happened--Japan wasn't provoked, they didn't attack us, we didn't drop the bomb, we didn't got to war in Europe. Would everybody be speaking German right now? The nazi's claimed they were only interested in the continent of Europe. But had they succeeded, what then? What would have stopped them from continuing on, and with their help of their allies, attacking us with a lot more force and support behind them?
Like fundamentalist Muslims, who aren't content just to pray and worship in private, the Nazi party wanted to spread their agenda--they thought they were superior to other human beings. That's why they were dangerous and morally wrong. And it's also why Islamic fundamentalists must be stopped. You only have to look at Saudi Arabia to see the truth. Half the human population (females) are not only second class citizens, they define the word "slave". No birth certificate, no death certificate--they are property. Wahabism is an insidious set of religious beliefs that wants to put all the power in the hands of a few clerics. They will go to the grave before they will give up that power--and they are.
I know all about the Carlyle group. An investment group that keeps people with high level contacts very rich. The more we expose about the Carlyle group and it's memebers activities, the better. Yes, the Bush administration protected the Bin Laden family because of these financial contacts and that stinks. But the Bush administration is still taking heat from that mistake, and the end result is that Saudi/US relations are on the hot plate even more now than had they not received this special treatment. It has made people aware of the Carlyle group, the Bin Laden wealth and in how many hands it stretches. It has made many more people aware of the Saudi's and what they believe--what they teach in their schools, how they truly feel about their "friend" the United States. In the past year and a half, since 9/11, journalists from both political parties have supplied heat about the hypocrisy of the U.S./Saudi relationship. The Saudi's and the Bin Ladens are not happy.
Corrupt individuals within the government need to be exposed. But if you think our government is bad, consider living in a country like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq or Kuwait. We will never be a police state. Americans are a mixture of too many cultures, races and relgions to ever be of one mind. We still have the right to bear arms, and pushed to the wall, it would be "give me liberty or give me death". You can't kill freedom in this country, and our opinions freely expressed on this webboard is proof of that.
Note: if this webboard gets shut down, I'll start changing my tune. Ha Ha
Swamp gas: I don't think I've resorted to name calling...I don't recall calling anybody a conspiracy theorist, nut or whatever. As a matter of fact, I'm really interested in what everybody has to say. I just wanted to throw in my own two cents. And like you, I'd rather be prepared than sorry. We just disagree on what's coming down the road.