posted 09-17-2001 06:23 PM            

By now I'm sure everyone is aware that military personnel are openly talking about the use of nuclear weapons in what appears to be an unavoidable military campaign.

posted 09-17-2001 08:32 PM            

I have received many e-mails, a few personal assaults (yes, it's on the other side as well) and the like from people who don't agree with me. It's no big deal, as I am used to it. I have been labeled a nazi, fascist, asshole for many years simply because I am patriotic and don't agree with how things have been going and how things have been handled.
I love my country, but I do not love my government. They do not represent me, or the majority of the people here.

To catch a rat, you have to think, act, and become a rat. Regardless of whether or not Bin Laden has anything to do with the recent attacks, he is a threat to my brothers and sisters. And it's time to catch a few rats.

Will we ever know the truth? No. Everyone previously mentioned in past posts serve many purposes. Saddam to give us a reason to be there. Bin Laden, I hate to say this, a reason to go to war. Perhaps to boost the economy or further more sinister causes. Who knows? I do know this: This act can not be tolerated and can not be avenged. Maybe I am jaded because I still do not know if a friend of mine is alive or dead and is still listed as missing in New York. Or maybe I am jaded because a close friend's aunt is in a NYC hospital and will be for many months because of this. Or maybe I am jaded because, as a father, there are hundreds of children who will remember mom or dad from a quick goodbye that morning or a picture on the damn news reports, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe I am jaded because until this weekend, I did not know if 2 friends were killed at the Pentagon. Or maybe I am jaded because my friend feared he had lost his step-dad in the attack on the Pentagon (he is fine, other than having no office anymore, but left the building with 3 people to get something to eat 3 minutes before the plane hit and saw it happen). Now, with this in mind, am I sitting here saying turn Afghanistan and others into a parking lot? No. Am I saying take your anger out on Muslims here? No. Hell, they are Americans too. I am simply saying get those responsible, bring them to justice and be proactive against those who want to bring this kind of action against us or anyone else again.

posted 09-17-2001 10:22 PM            

In spite of much of what I post, one should realize that much of what I write is merely food for further consideration.

Anyone who even remotely thinks that this situation can be handled in a strictly diplomatic or "non-military" fashion absolutely does not understand the thinking of the perpetrators -- not at all. Further, a purely "diplomatic" approach will only give existing cell groups more time and leeway in which to regroup and carry out the next wave of deadly attacks -- an outcome which would only push us closer to a "reactionary", all-out war.

Hopefully, my posts indicate the need for historical precedents (admittedly in a time when such precedents will be rare) and the need for strategic reflection before we take decisive action -- so that whatever ultimately happens, we do not, as a nation, "overreact" or get bogged down in simultaneous, untenable military situations -- for the consequences would be dreadful indeed, and ultimately leave us wide open for exactly that which we need to avoid (the possibility of further terroristic attacks at home).

Make no mistake, those responsible for the recent attacks need to be brought to justice -- and perhaps "by any means necessary" -- but exactly HOW we go about that may determine the future of the planet, as we know it, if the situation "escalates".

Consider the fact that our strategic ally in this endeavor, Pakistan, will for the duration of this exercise and far beyond be engendering the ill will of one of it's bordering neighbors, Afghanistan -- even as it's remaining border state, India, may opportunistically seek to pursue "other" political or military challenges with Pakistan's government while it is otherwise "predisposed" in this operation -- and all initiated at the request of the United States.

Take a look at a map if you think I'm exaggerating, but such a scenario would place our most pivotal, strategic partner in this action directly between "the devil and the deep blue sea" -- and leave us with little to fall back upon, if anything but perhaps the ultimate hostility of the Pakistani people.

That's a difficult position at best, considering recent history between India and Pakistan (both nuclear powers). And yet we, as a nation, now appear "ready and willing" to hinge the success or failure of a theatre-wide military operation on that chance. The possibility of our young men and women being "stranded" in the crossfire of third parties, virtually NONE of which shares our ultimate interests, bothers me -- not to mention the sheer logistical difficulty of waging a ground campaign in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Please don't take my comments as a call to "do nothing." On the contrary, we need to do something decisive, and I believe also relatively fast -- but we very much need to do it exceedingly well.

Compromises will no doubt be made -- but they shouldn't risk additional American lives needlessly, as our sons and daughters ARE our future as a nation -- if we're to have one at all. If we somehow "bog down" in Afghanistan, then this does not bode well for the potential of fending off terrorists in other parts of the world, and will further put a huge barrier in front of the administration's stated objectives.

My grandfather would tell me, "If you want to flush grouse, then you need some good dogs, a little bit of cover -- and you also need to know where to look for the grouse."

Barring that grouse may be out of season in Afghanistan, superior intelligence, air power, and "response time" will all play a key role in capturing anyone like Osama bin Laden. Our ground troops may find it very difficult going if trying to outgun or "outfight" Afghani forces on unfamiliar terrain. All the same, I truly wish them the best if this is the only approach our military chooses to pursue -- and may they return home well and soon.

Americans always excell when we allow ourselves to be "shining examples" for the world with our own behavior -- and NOT when we try and bully our world neighbors into whatever our desires happen to be at the moment. That's my entire point.

posted 09-18-2001 11:51 PM            

Millions of shares sold before disaster

BY JAMES DORAN

THE CIA has asked the City regulators in London to investigate suspicious sales of millions of shares before last Tuesday’s attacks in America in the belief that the paper trail will lead to the terrorists.
American authorities are investigating unusually large numbers of shares in airlines, insurance companies and arms manufacturers that were sold off in the days and weeks before the attacks.

They believe that the sales were by people who knew about the impending disaster.

The investigators are looking at so-called “short selling” transactions in several financial centres across the world involving shares that dropped dramatically after the attack.

Short selling involves borrowing shares, selling them to a third party, then buying them back when the price falls. Large profits can be made if a share price falls significantly after it has been sold to the third party.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA), the stock market watchdog, was drawn into the investigation because it has a transaction monitoring department that checks suspicious share movements.

The FSA would not comment on its instructions from the CIA, but said that its team of specialists would do all they could to help the investigation. A spokesman said: “The financial authorities have great expertise in this field and could have a big part to play. It is something that is incumbent upon us all to look at to the best of our ability.”

Market regulators in Germany, Japan and the US received information of short selling of insurance company shares, airline stocks and shares in arms companies — all of which have fallen since the attack. Italian, French and Swiss regulators have also joined the investigation.

Munich Re, Swiss Re and Axa, all insurance companies, are also helping the authorities with the inquiries as large numbers of their shares were short-sold before the attack.

A spokesman for Axa, a French company, said: “We have informed the market regulators in Paris that there are concerns about short selling.”

Richard Crossley, an analyst at Teather & Greenwood, a City broker, said that he had tracked suspicious short selling and share dumping in a swath of stocks badly affected by the terrorist attacks.

He said that on the Friday before the attacks, more than 10 million shares in Merrill Lynch, the US investment bank, were sold compared with 4 million on a normal day. He added that exceptionally high volumes of retail and leisure stocks had also caught his attention.

“Before the attacks there was no pattern to this phenomenon,” he said. “The shares that were sold were doing very well and someone was selling them in very large quantities with no real reason.”

Mr Crossley believes that someone with inside knowledge of the attacks could have been making money on its expected outcome for up to three weeks before the terrorists struck.

“What is more awful than he should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western financial markets? But to profit from it. Words fail me,” Mr Crossley said.

posted 09-19-2001 09:37 AM            

quote:

---

Who did it?
Foreign Report presents an alternative view

Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. Directing the mission, Aman officers believe, were two of the world’s foremost terrorist masterminds: the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas operations for Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, senior member of Al-Qaeda and possible successor of the ailing Osama Bin Laden.

The two men have not been seen for some time. Mughniyeh is probably the world’s most wanted outlaw. Unconfirmed reports in Beirut say he has undergone plastic surgery and is unrecognisable. Zawahiri is thought to be based in Egypt. He could be Bin Laden’s chief representative outside Afghanistan.

---

posted 09-26-2001 10:38 AM            

What a great opportunity for the CIA/State Dept etc. to finally admit to what researchers have been saying for years; CIA supplying Stinger missiles to Afghan rebels to counter the Soviets during their "Viet Nam" was like letting the genie out of the bottle...like nuclear proliferation but on a controllable scale. More justification for decades of fresh cold war activites to keep Langley and TPTB in control of human events?

If they could only 'fess up, admit to making a huge mistake, I mean, there would even be that much more support for our War on Terrorism, not to mention actually trusting the American public with the Truth for a change. But maybe supplying 'CIA assets' with high-tech weapons like Stinger missles was more than a mistake or calculated risk?

With Stinger missiles/technology available to the highest bidder, was it really worth supplying them to 'CIA asset' Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets? Maybe, but then again, maybe there never would have been a WTC/Pentagon attack if we had known about American civilian and military planes being blasted out of the sky even as authorities concocted theories and phony explanations about pilot error and mechanical failure?

posted 09-26-2001 06:20 PM            

Industry wide at this point, largely due to fears regarding the recent wave of jet hijackings and attacks, $$ billions are being lost weekly.

That's a lot of incentive for a CIA (which has already publicly admitted that it works for US commercial interests worldwide) to come up with ANY sort of face-(ass?) saving measure in order to "stabilize the economy".

posted 09-26-2001 10:27 PM            

I heard lately that the aviation/airline industry in the U.S. represents 10% of the U.S. gross national product. It's no wonder that the economy has taken such a huge hit, still wonder about the implications, though I think we'd be better off pursuing new ground-transport like 'mag-lev' trains and alternative fuel sources to get away from oil-based economy.

Maybe there will be a bright side to this, though it's a shame it had to come at the cost of 6500+ lives, not to mention the future inevitable losses from 'America's New War on Terrorism'.

Bin Laden comes off looking like an evil genius here in some ways, but I wonder whether or not he'll be caught 'dead or alive' considering other CIA assets like Hussein, Noriega et al who are still alive and kicking. Maybe they're all just boogey men... characters playing a part in a grander scheme?

More likely economic scenario may be the inevitable boost to U.S. military aviation/technology/intel and continued dominance of air power and global control? Loss of freedoms and destruction of the U.S. Constitution like those from the Clinton years? Seems obvious to me that this WTC/Pentagon attack has given the U.S./TPTB? a great excuse to further a strategic.military presence in the mid-east, and closer to Russia and China than ever before. Aren't we now poised for a 'kill shot', one step closer to complete global domination. A real American Empire?

From a military standpoint, there seems to be a logical progression here. But, why hasn't Russia been invited into NATO??...and consequently, an end to the need for NATO? This would seem the perfect opportunity. With China and Russia's progression/transition into capitalism, all that's left is disarmament of any hositles. (Someone has certainly tried to disarm American citizens over the past two Clinton terms!! )

As crazy as it seems, sometimes I think there really is a method to all this apparent madness. Oh oh, maybe I'm starting to think like TPTB?

posted 09-26-2001 11:21 PM            

quote:

---

Maybe they're all just boogey men... characters playing a part in a grander scheme?

---

I think that's right, Defender. What strikes me most are the reports that Bin Laden remined blissfully unaware that the CIA was funneling resources to him during his war against the Soviets.

posted 09-26-2001 11:35 PM            

I know what you mean about that guaging theory Chem11. Seems odd the way trails are so obvious sometimes, and yes, they are back after an apparent absence. I've seen them today, the abreviated kind, like the switch was turned on and off, and lots of the wispy cloud formations that seem too low to the ground to be normal.

Yes, good question. Are we someones assets? or a bellweather, canaries in a coal mine to guage public reaction to covert/overt Nonconsensual Human Experimentation. Maybe TPTB have learned that even though we question this phenomenon, we are having minimal effect on public opinion? They control conventional media, who knows if they aren't already in control of the Internet. I'd actually be surprised if they weren't to some extent.

How many people are really paying attention to this? I mean, to people like us here on these websites? Seems that it could be guaged and calculated very easily by TPTB with their access to the best and latest technolgies? I don't know.

Then I also sometimes wonder if TPTB are not necessarily entirely malevolent. And maybe we really are being given something to protect us from bio/chem warfare. Though it could just as easily be doing the opposite, poisoning us slowly, methodically?

I do believe that there is conflict among TPTB, and that it's not as black and white as we may think. There is certainly spiritual warfare going on, as in good vs. evil.

posted 09-27-2001 01:04 PM            

Also noticed some FOX video of a smirking Condit (remember him?) as he attended one of the church services following the 9/11 attacks. He was smiling like a Cheshire Cat, (like the cat that swallowed the canary?)

posted 09-27-2001 01:54 PM            

Could the OKC bombing have been a 'dry run' or progenitor to the WTC attack.

OKC Bombing succeeded in shutting down the militia movement, that, at the time was threatening to turn into a new American Civil war over attacks against the U.S. Constitution, including the 2nd Ammendment (which was the only one widely reported by controlled mainstream media). Media failed to report legitimate militia groups who were fed up with POW/MIA debacle, lies about Viet Nam, assassinations/coverups and non-stop internal attacks against the Constituion during the Clinton regime, etc. etc.

Could WTC attack be used to justify the tracking down of 'terrorists' and rogue nations, to gain support through popular world opinion, just as OKC bombing was immediately labeled as a 'militia' attack? 24 hour coverage of the tragedy with the perpertrator(s) quickly identified, demonized and targeted with the additional and hidden 'benefits' not publicized.

The victims as sacrificial lambs serving a greater purpose. "The end justifies the means"?

Or was it just fate? TPTB saw how nice and tidy and effective the OKC Bombing was in achieving their objectives, they decided to unleash the Taliban and other special ops groups against the World Trade Center?

Or am I just paranoid?

posted 09-27-2001 10:28 PM            

Along the same lines you mentioned, this might also allow for more precise assassinations of a target or individual targets while on the plane. Coverup would just include the 'fact' that the target was a terrorist, end of story and investigation.

That would at least be a bit more humane than previous 'hits' on targets in aircraft that included the 'collateral damage' of killing everyone else on the plane, as has been done before.

posted 09-28-2001 12:11 AM            

http://www.fieler.com/terror/

posted 09-28-2001 12:21 PM            

I just wanted to reiterate what I said about Air Marshals. I'm seeing that as a possibility that they could be used as assassins, probably in very rare cases, with or without the blessings or instructions of TPTB. Law enforcement disguises, (uniform and plain-clothes) have been used a number of times in modern history, including reports of them being used in both JFK, RFK assassinations and just lately by someone posing as a cop who murdered 14(?) people in Switzerland with a bomb and an assault rifle.

posted 02-25-2002 08:18 PM            

quote:

---

VIETNAM: THE BONESMEN'S DEBACLE
http://davidicke.www.50megs.com/icke/magazine/vol10/articles/skullboneswp.html

According to author David Halberstam's best-selling critique of the Kennedy years, "The Best and the Brightest," the JFK presidency marked the high point of Skull & Bones postwar power. But it also marked the beginning of the secret fraternity's fall from the position of unchallenged power, and the beginning of America's precipitous decline as a world power. All these factors are summed up in one word: Vietnam.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Cabinet was largely handpicked by Skull & Bones elder statesman Robert Lovett, who was personally approached by Joseph Kennedy, the president's father, and asked to shape the direction of the new administration. Lovett had been one of the architects of the World War II industrial mobilization under President Franklin Roosevelt, which helped bring the United States out of the Great Depression. He had been a factional opponent of Averell Harriman within the Skull & Bones circles, initially opposing the Cold War containment doctrine and pushing the idea of Atoms for Peace during the early years of the Eisenhower presidency (l952-1960).

Kennedy had personally asked Lovett to join his Cabinet, but Lovett, a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, preferred to shun formal government service. Instead, he placed a number of younger Bonesmen into the critical posts. McGeorge Bundy was appointed Kennedy's National Security Adviser. Averell Harriman was made Under Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, a position that placed him in charge of many of the most critical decisions along the way to disaster in Vietnam. William Bundy remained in a senior post at CIA.

The decision to escalate the American military involvement in Vietnam -- a rejection of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's prophetic warning that the United States should never engage in a ground war in Asia -- was made by members of the Order. According to some accounts, President Kennedy began to have serious second thoughts about escalating the war, particularly after several private Oval Office discussions with MacArthur.

With Kennedy's assassination, American soldiers began pouring into Southeast Asia. Harriman remained a fixture of Vietnam policy under President Lyndon Baines Johnson. McGeorge Bundy remained on as LBJ's National Security Adviser untill , when he left government service to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation, the largest tax-exempt philanthropic agency in the United States. The Ford Foundation annually dispenses of nearly $3 billion in grants.

In his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy helped finance the anti-Vietnam War movement. The National Student Mobilization Committee, the umbrella group for the entire New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s, was led by David Dellinger, a Yale graduate. Episcopal Church activist William Sloan Coffin, a Bonesman, a second leading figure in the anti-war protest movement, had previously served as a CIA officer.

Thus, the Order had its hands in two critical elements of the policy debacle of the second half of the 1960s. Some leading Bonesmen helped shape the disastrous limited war strategy in Vietnam, while other members of the Order, at least tacitly, contributed to the growth of the drug-rock-sex counterculture by nourishing the New Left soil from which it sprang.

As a result of the Vietnam debacle, the "Stimson Kindergarten" literally drove itself out of the corridors of power which it had occupied without challenge for the previous 20 years. With the election of Richard Nixon as president of the United States in November 1968, a different team came into prominence. The politics of that team were personified by Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser and Secretary of State.

In a May 1982 speech in London at the Chatham House headquarters of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Kissinger boasted that he was an enthusiastic follower of the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that throughout his years in senior government posts under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford (1974-1976), he had always consulted more frequently with his counterparts in the British Foreign Office than he had with officials of his own government.

Although Kissinger had enjoyed early patronage from McGeorge Bundy, when the Bonesman was Dean of Harvard University and Kennedy's NSC adviser, the Kissinger era marked a low point in Skull & Bones' government power. The Central Intelligence Agency, a hub of the Order's clout, was decimated by scandals that only compounded the damage done to the Agency as the result of its role in the Vietnam disaster.

According to some respected writers, for example, Jim Hougan, author of "Secret Agenda," the CIA attempted to reverse the route by helping to bring down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There is significant evidence to bolster some of these accounts.

When Gerald Ford became president in August 1974 following Nixon's resignation, Skull & Bones made a brief comeback. In what came to be known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," Ford, in the autumn of 1975, removed Henry Kissinger from his post as NSC Adviser, replacing him with Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger ally James Schlesinger was fired as Secretary of Defense and replaced by Donald Rumsfeld. And CIA Director William Colby, who had dueled with Angleton, was fired and replaced by Skull & Bones member George Bush.

If these maneuvers were intended to be the first step in a more ambitious comeback by the WASP warrior faction, the plan was short-circuited with the election in November 1976 of Jimmy Carter as president. It would really not be until the inauguration of George Bush as president in January 1989 -- a dozen years later -- that Skull & Bones would resurface with the same degree of governmental power that it had enjoyed during the Stimson years. George Bush's selection as Ronald Reagan's vice presidential running mate in the 1980 and 1984 elections was the transition back to that power.

---