posted 03-12-2002 03:01 AM            

Today we mourn the passing of an old friend, by
the name of Common sense.
Common Sense lived a long life but died in the
United States from heart
failure on the brink of the new millennium. No one
really knows how old he
was, since his birth records were long ago lost in
bureaucratic red tape.

He selflessly devoted his life to service in schools,
homes, factories
helping folks get jobs done without fanfare and
foolishness. For decades,
petty rules, silly laws, and frivolous lawsuits held
no power over Common
Sense.

He was credited with cultivating such valued
lessons as to know when to come
in out of the rain, why the early bird gets the worm,
and that life isn't
always fair.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial
policies (don't spend more
than you earn), reliable parenting strategies (the
adults are in charge,
not the kids), and it's okay to come in second. A
veteran of the Industrial
Revolution, the Great Depression, and the
Technological Revolution,
Common Sense survived cultural and educational
trends including body
piercing, whole language, and "new math." But his
health declined when he
became infected with the
"If-it-only-helps-one-person-it's-worth-it" virus.

In recent decades his waning strength proved no
match for the ravages of
well intentioned but overbearing regulations. He
watched in pain as good
people became ruled by self-seeking lawyers. His
health rapidly deteriorated
when schools endlessly implemented
zero-tolerance policies. Reports of a
six-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment
for kissing a classmate,
a teen suspended for taking a swig of mouthwash
after lunch, and a teacher
fired for reprimanding an unruly student only
worsened his condition.

It declined even further when schools had to get
parental consent to
administer aspirin to a student but could not inform
the parent when a
female student was pregnant or wanted an
abortion. Finally, Common Sense
lost his will to live as the Ten Commandments
became contraband, churches
became businesses, criminals received better
treatment than victims, and
federal judges stuck their noses in everything from
the Boy Scouts to
professional sports. Finally, when a woman, too
stupid to realize that a
steaming cup of coffee was hot, was awarded a
huge settlement,
Common Sense threw in the towel. As the end
neared, Common Sense drifted in
and out of logic but was kept informed of
developments regarding
questionable regulations such as those for low
flow toilets, rocking chairs,
and stepladders.

Common Sense was preceded in death by his
parents, Truth and Trust; his
wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and
his son, Reason.
He is survived by two stepbrothers: My Rights, and
Ima Whiner. Not many
attended his funeral because so few realized he
was gone.
http://chemtrailandcompanyiii.community.everyone.net/commun_v3/scripts/thread.pl

posted 03-16-2002 02:47 PM            

If you aren't aware of the true existence of conspiracies, then you're neglecting a major component of the 'why' question, as to why chemtrails exist.

That must be why contrail believers never seem to have an opinion on;

* S&L rip-off,
* multiple political assassinations,
* phony drug war,
* CIA involvement in narcotics trafficking,
* non-consensual human experimentation,
etc. etc.

If contrail believers acknowledge any of these conspiracies or addressed them, they might have to abandon their policy of denying the likelihood of a chemtrail conspiracy.

On the other hand, if they happen to agree that these conspiracies are real, it may be that they agree with the perpertators/designers of them? Could it be that you think that, even though they happened, (and are happening), then the 'government' must have a good reason for doing them, and that we shouldn't question them? It would then follow, that if chemtrails are also a conspiracy, (with this kind of mindset), it's best not to question them, for the same reason you don't question any other conspiracy.

Is that why you think it's common sense to support the 'non-existence' theory?

It's to your credit seeker, that you have, (on one occasion), acknowledged some conspiracies, but many, if not all others who support the "non-existence" of chemtrails fail to address the reality of the other conspiracies mentioned above.

You can maintain that chemtrails are only contrails, but the contrail studies you and others have cited do not explain the chemtrail phenomenon to the majority of us here. Regardless of what you say, we are not fools.

posted 03-21-2002 03:58 AM            

It occurs in many locations, multiple times, simultaneously in a well established manner.
Therefore, it is not just practice or a 'dry-run'.
It occurs even in airspace heavily traffic'd by commerical aircraft and highly visible areas.
Therefore, it is not 'training' but is the actual ongoing project. The real deal.
It occurs over large cities, with heavy population. These are where the government gets its power. The government is not self-destructive. Combining this with the above, and I assume that..
Therefore, its intent is NOT to solely kill, sicken, or main citizens.
It occurs in many locations all over the nation. An experiment, by definition, would target a limited scope since you could get negative impact.(see above assumption)
Therefore, it is almost certainly not a scientific experiment.
Criss-cross patterns are created by repeated runs of the same aircraft over the same area.
Therefore, the goal requires area coverage.
The spray is unleashed high in the sky, allowing it to dilute into the air before touchdown.
Therefore, the goal is probably either:
To affect an area higher up in the sky.
or
Is best attained by UNconcentrated coverage of ground area.

posted 03-21-2002 12:33 PM            

Were It So
For the Faithful | By Eric Francis

Posted March 18, 2002
THERE WERE NO MARTIANS.On the night of Oct. 30, 1938, back when mass media was in its infancy, we learned something significant about how public consciousness works when exposed to unusual, frightening news reports: most people will believe anything.War of the Worlds was a dramatization of an attack by Martians on (of all places) New Jersey created by Orson Welles, as part of his weekly Mercury Theater of the Air series on WCBS radio. The setup for the show was a phony musical entertainment program, into which announcers would interrupt with fictitious news updates of the invasion. Every ten or so minutes, another narrator would break in and explain how the whole program was a fantasy -- stating clearly that it was not real. But few people heard that part, or perhaps gave danger the benefit of the doubt. The highways were jammed, and people were packing up their belongings and leaving their homes with wet towels wrapped around their faces as a result of the gas attack by space aliens.
Skip ahead 64 years.
We have been told over and over again that at 9:43 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, as part of a "coordinated terrorist attack on the United States," American Airlines Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon, the military headquarters of the free world. Flight 77 was a Boeing 757-200 airliner, weighing about 100 tons (200,000 pounds).

According to The New York Times, the jet was crashed into the ground floor of the building at "well over 500 miles per hour," which would "maximize the destruction and make the plane easier to handle."During the six months that we have heard this repeated, in various forms, by every official media outlet in existence, have we ever stopped to question: where is the airplane wreckage?Why doesn't this picture make sense?
Was it Wonder Woman's invisible plane?
Where is the impact crater created by a massive projectile hitting the Earth at at least three-quarters of the speed of sound, then exploding?
Why does the building debris fall in the wrong direction?Where was the massive, widespread fireball that would be created by igniting 7,000 to 9,000 gallons of jet fuel on board the plane, which was headed for a coast-to-coast flight?
Why is the damage to the building so small -- narrower than half the wingspan of the airplane that supposedly hit it, with no indication of where the wings made impact, or where they went?
Why did the facade of the building fall off, neatly in one hunk, nearly half an hour after the supposed crash (reported in numerous chronologies as 10:10 a.m.)?
Why was the facade not shattered after it was hit by a jet airliner moving at full speed?I think these are reasonable, obvious questions, the kind you would expect to meet in the first week of an accident investigation course.

Most people I am speaking to (in the media, the environmental community, the legal community, the political community and elsewhere) have never noticed any of this, or questioned what they have seen in print. For six months, I did not notice. I could never understand why there wasn't plane wreckage, but I never asked myself the question. It was only after a colleague sent me the link to Asile.org, an art web page based in France, that I put it together, but only because it was shown to me.Have we looked at those photos and presumed that the damage looked so serious, and so disturbing, that we assumed the airliner was "in there somewhere"?Or did we lose track of this minor detail while we were lost lost in the shock and horror of flights 11 and 175 plunging into the World Trade Center (repeated endlessly, toasting the image of airplanes flying into buildings into our imaginations from hour one of the crisis), and the subsequent collapse of the towers, and the horror of the crushed people and the 300 lost firefighters, and the emotional overload that followed, and the swell of patriotism, the donated blood, the Red Cross banners everywhere, and then the anthrax scare, and vilifying bin Laden, and the War on Terror, and the faltering economy, and Enron, Kenny Lay and Arthur Anderson, and our scared, confused kids, and the laundry and shopping and the dust buffalo under the kitchen table, and putting our fragile hearts and minds back together here in what's being called the post-9-11 world?

Do we remember those first days, when anything at all was possible, when the skies had an eerie silence, and nothing made any sense at all? America under attack? Who would think to scour the newspapers and the internet for images of plane wreckage from Flight 77, or to see if the damage to the buildings matched the story we were hearing? Of course there was plane wreckage, somewhere in there.
I CANNOT PROVE that something did or did not happen. I was not there, nor was there a press pool gathered outside the Pentagon when the airliner supposedly struck. There is no known video of an airplane hitting the building -- but something claiming to be just that was released last week. In this article, I am not going to take the pro-con format, in which I objectively debate the evidence of "both sides." I am interested, rather, in what happens to us, psychologically and spiritually, when we are confronted with obvious evidence of something that contradicts our previous beliefs, our common sense and the view we hold of the world.So, first, let's take a look at the materials in question. ...
Continued @ http://www.ericfrancis.com/articles/wereitso.html

posted 03-23-2002 09:36 PM            

Don Abbott, of Command Emergency Response Training, walks over to the Pentagon and extinguishes the flames. The Pentagon was a model and the "plane crash" was a simulated one....
http://mdwweb.mdw.army.mil/news/Contingency_Planning.html

posted 03-24-2002 08:47 AM            

In order to analyze the two pictures, you have to know a bit about photography. If you shoot an object 10 or 15 feet away with another object 300 feet behind it, the longer the lens, the closer together they will appear.

My guess is that the first photograph, with the firefighters and the Pentagon seeming very close, was taken with a longer lens, perhaps a 200mm telephoto. This way, the photographer was able to get a good view of both the wreckage and the firefighters.

The second shot looks like it was taken with a shorter lens, maybe 50mm or 28mm. This would still show the wreckage as the main part of the photograph, but would also show a much larger portion of the Pentagon and would give the viewer an idea of the magnitude of the damage.

And although the shadows are not exactly the same, that could be accounted for by the possibility of the two photographs taken at different times during the day. As the late summer sun moved further west by south, the shadows would move slightly in respect to the ground, irrespective of where the photographer was standing.

Regards,

posted 03-27-2002 07:33 AM            

This is a story about a little white lie that bred dozens of other little white lies, then hundreds of bigger white lies and so on, to the point where the first little white lie must be credited as the “Mother of All Lies” about events on 11 September 2001. For this was the little white lie that first activated the American psyche, generated mass loathing, and enabled media manipulation of the global population.
Without this little white lie there would have been no Arab Hijackers, no Osama Bin Laden directing operations from afar, and no “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and occupied Palestine. Clearly the lie was so clever and diabolical in nature, it must have been generated by the “Power Elite” in one of its more earthly manifestations. Perhaps it was the work of the Council on Foreign Relations, or the Trilateral Commission?
No, it was not. Though at the time the little white lie was flagged with a powerful political name, there was and remains no evidence to support the connection. Just like the corrupt and premature Lee Harvey Oswald story in 1963, there are verifiable fatal errors which ultimately prove the little white lie was solely the work of members of the media. Only they had access, and only they had the methods and means.
The little white lie was about Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator for CNN and wife of US Solicitor General Ted Olson. Now deceased, Mrs Olson is alleged to have twice called her husband from an American Airlines Flight 77 seat-telephone, before the aircraft slammed into the Pentagon. This unsubstantiated claim, reported by CNN remarkably quickly at 2.06 am EDT [0606 GMT] on September 12, was the solitary foundation on which the spurious “Hijacker” story was built.
Without the “eminent” Barbara Olson and her alleged emotional telephone calls, there would never be any proof that humans played a role in the hijack and destruction of the four aircraft that day. Lookalike claims surfaced several days later on September 16 about passenger Todd Beamer and others, but it is critically important to remember here that the Barbara Olson story was the only one on September 11 and. 12. It was beyond question the artificial “seed” that started the media snowball rolling down the hill.
And once the snowball started rolling down the hill, it artfully picked up Osama Bin Laden and a host of other “terrorists” on the way. By noon on September 12, every paid glassy-eyed media commentator in America was either spilling his guts about those “Terrible Muslim hijackers”, or liberating hitherto classified information about Osama Bin Laden. “Oh sure, it was Bin Laden,” they said blithely, oblivious to anything apart from their television appearance fees.
The deliberate little white lie was essential. Ask yourself: What would most Americans have been thinking about on September 12, if CNN had not provided this timely fiction? Would anyone anywhere have really believed the insane government story about failed Cessna pilots with box cutters taking over heavy jets, then hurling them expertly around the sky like polished Top Guns from the film of the same name? Of course not! As previously stated there would have been no Osama Bin Laden, and no “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and occupied Palestine.
This report is designed to examine the sequence of the Olson events and lay them bare for public examination. Dates and times are of crucial importance here, so if this report seems tedious try to bear with me. Before moving on to discuss the impossibility of the alleged calls, we first need to examine how CNN managed to “find out” about them, reported here in the September 12 CNN story at 2.06 am EDT:
“Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN. Shortly afterwards Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon” … “Ted Olson told CNN that his wife said all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters. She felt nobody was in charge and asked her husband to tell the pilot what to do.”
At no point in the above report does CNN quote Ted Olson directly. If the report was authentic and 100% attributable, it would have been phrased quite differently. Instead of “Ted Olson told CNN that his wife said all passengers and flight personnel…”, the passage would read approximately:- Mr Olson told CNN, “My wife said all passengers and flight personnel…” Whoever wrote this story was certainly not in direct contact with US Solicitor General Ted Olson.
Think about it, people! If you knew or suspected your spouse’s aircraft had just fireballed inside the Pentagon building, how would you spend the rest of the day? Initially you would certainly be in deep shock and unwilling to believe the reports. Then you would start to gather your wits together, a slow process in itself. After that and depending on individual personality, you might drive over to the Pentagon on the off chance your spouse survived the horrific crash, or you might go home and wait for emergency services to bring you the inevitable bad news. As a matter of record, Ted Olson did not return to work until six days later.
About the last thing on your mind [especially if you happened to be the US Solicitor General], would be to pick up a telephone and call the CNN Atlanta news desk in order to give them a “scoop”. As a seasoned politician you would already know that all matters involving national security must first be vetted by the National Security Council. Under the extraordinary circumstances and security overkill existing on September 11, this vetting process would have taken a minimum of two days, and more likely three.
The timing of the CNN news release about Barbara Olson, is therefore as impossible as the New Zealand press release back in 1963 about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As reported independently by Colonel Fletcher Prouty USAF (Retired), whoever set Kennedy up, accidentally launched a full international newswire biography on obscure “killer” Lee Harvey Oswald, without first taking the trouble to check his world clock.
It was still “yesterday” in New Zealand on the other side of the International Date Line when the biography was wired from New York, enabling the Christchurch Star newspaper was able to print a story about Oswald as the prime suspect in its morning edition, several hours before he was first accused of the crime by Dallas police.
If the CNN story about Ted Olson had been correct, and he really had called them about Barbara on September 11, then he would most surely have followed the telephone call up a few days later with a tasteful “one-on-one” television interview, telling the hushed and respectful interviewer about how badly he missed his wife, and about the sheer horror of it all.
There is no record of any such interview in the CNN or other archives. Indeed, if you key “Barbara Olson” into the CNN search engine, it returns only two related articles. The first is the creative invention on September 12 at 2.06 am EDT [0606 GMT], and the second is on December 12, about President Bush, who led a White House memorial that began at 8:46 a.m. EST, the moment the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center three months before. CNN includes this comment about Ted Olson:
“In a poignant remembrance at the Justice Department, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson referred to "the sufferings we have all experienced." He made no direct reference to the death of his wife, Barbara Olson, who was a passenger aboard the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon…”
Regarding the same event, Fox News reports that, extraordinarily, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson then said Barbara Olson's call, made "in the midst of terrible danger and turmoil swirling around her," was a "clarion call that awakened our nation's leaders to the true nature of the events of Sept. 11."
So Ted Olson avoided making any direct personal reference to the death of his wife. Clearly this was not good enough for someone somewhere. By the sixth month anniversary of the attack, Ted Olson was allegedly interviewed by London Telegraph reporter Toby Harnden, with his exclusive story “She Asked Me How To Stop The Plane” appearing in that London newspaper on March 5, thereafter renamed and syndicated around dozens of western countries as “Revenge Of The Spitfire”, finally appearing in the West Australian newspaper on Saturday March 23, 2002.
I have diligently tried to find a copy of this story in an American newspaper but have so far failed. The reasons for this rather perverse “external” publication of Ted Olson’s story are not yet clear, but it seems fair to observe that if he is ever challenged by a Senate Select Committee about the veracity of his claims, the story could not be used against him because it was published outside American sovereign territory....
http://www.geocities.com/subliminalsuggestion/olson.html

posted 03-27-2002 08:08 AM            

Geopolitics is a chess game. Rockefeller´s protégé Zbigniew Brzezinski, has a book entitled The Grand Chessboard. As in chess, a drastic “sacrifice” (such as Sept. 11) always has a more far-reaching purpose. The Anglo American elite´s game-plan is to use control of oil to blackmail Europe, Russia and China to accept its hegemony in the upcoming New World Order. No wonder the rest of the world is not crazy about attacking Iraq.

Iraq´s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz recently expressed a similar view in an interview with a German newspaper ( Weltam Sonntag 10.03.02). He said he thought the war is inevitable because “Bush wants control over Iraq´s oil resources as a lever to pressure Europe, Russia and China.”

The New World Order will consolidate Anglo American elite control of the world. Its social and economic agenda includes the promotion of homosexuality and feminism, the continued destruction of the nuclear family, abortion and depopulation, deindustrialization, elite monopoly of resources, middle class decline, and ever-greater disparities between rich and poor.

The nation state will gradually disappear and with it individual freedom, democracy, free speech and religion. The ultimate aim is the gradual dissolution of western civilization and the imposition of a new Dark Age. Like the recipe for boiling frogs, the elite has been slowly increasing the heat so we don´t realize this is happening. But we can feel it distinctly in the education system, the media and arts, family law, the military and of course politics.

The Anglo American elite has been trying to use oil to achieve hegemony for more than a century. According to F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, 1993) World War One occurred because Germany was expanding its influence into the oil rich Middle East. The Germans wanted to build a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad. An outrage incident, like Sept 11, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, by a Serbian “terrorist” got it started. The United States got involved because England was losing the war and owed billions to J.P. Morgan, their US purchase agent.

According to Engdahl, the elite was behind the oil shocks of the 1970´s. The price of oil went sky high when Henry Kissinger maneuvered Egypt into attacking Israel in 1973, and later when the CIA installed the Ayatollah Khomeini because the Shah of Iran was about to build German designed nuclear reactors. Engdahl says the oil industry is opposed to nuclear power and funds the environmental movement for this reason. He says the Three Mile Island scare was engineered to discredit this energy source.

The “Club of Rome” and the leaders of the major environmental groups belong to the elite. Its “green agenda” is a zero-sum Malthusian equation: the less there is for you, the more there will be for it. They want to hoard natural resources, retard industrial development, and cull the population. In 1974, the US government adopted Rockefeller protege Henry Kissinger's “NSSC Memorandum 200”. This directive made it a “national security” priority to restrict development and population growth in the Third World in order to access their raw materials more cheaply in the future. (Engdahl p. 164)

The war on terrorism is a charade. Sept. 11 was obviously a subterfuge that allowed Bush to hustle billions of dollars for war contrary to the US Constitution that gives war declaration power to congress. Sept. 11 also provided the “moral high ground” to invade Central Asia, Russia and China´s backyard.

According to psyche war veteran Richard Crossman: “The way to carry out good propaganda is to never appear to be carrying it out at all.”

It works. Just like the food we eat, and the cars we drive, the ideas we think are all packaged and sold. (Opposing views are weeded out.) When CIA stooges like Gloria Steinem say families are oppressive and women ought to work instead of raising children, the press dutifully raves and we all obey. When the CIA tells us nuclear power is unsafe and environmentally unfriendly, we turn our backs on a cheap reliable source of energy. When the CIA contracts the Mossad to stage a terror attack and tells us militant Islam is our enemy, we salute the flag and grab a rifle.

The Iraqi war now scheduled for May-June will divide the world into three camps: 1) the Anglo American elite, represented by George W. Bush, the US, British and Israeli governments, their lackeys, dependents and dupes; 2) Iraq, Iran and the part of the Muslim world that resists elite control. 3) Europe, Russia, China, Japan and the vast majority of humanity, which likes neither elite hegemony/blackmail nor Saddam Hussein/ Osama bin Laden and wishes they would both go away...
http://www.toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/20020327.htm

posted 03-27-2002 10:09 AM            

No, I don't suspect that, but I do know that there are always a bunch of nutz (some with Ph.D.s) who know that their hypotheses, while lacking anything but bellylaughs and button mushrooms, will sell books and get the attention of the more gullible.

There is a possibility that, if we go to war with Iraq, the United States will end up - at least temporarily - with a source of oil at what we have come to believe is a "fair" price. But there are a couple of caveats to that scenario, regardless of whether it could work to our national advantage,

First, I don't see an attack on Iraq any time soon, since every Middle East country has told Brother Cheney that they will not host our military adventurism; and a major 'nation building' (i.e., nation-destroying first) effort cannot reliably be maintained by our forces flying in from England or a bunch of carriers offshore. The sheikdoms correctly realize that the real flash point is not Iraq but Israel; and they have told us that the Israeli-Palestine War much be resolved first. So, until we can force a settlement between the sets of warring thugs in Israel/Palestine, don't look for B-1s over Baghdad or Saddam hanging from a lamppost.

Second, most American geopolitical planners believe that Saudi Arabia's days as the linchpin of export prices are numbered. In five years, the worlds biggest oil producer will be a nation just a bit further north. (hint: they're the largest country in the world, and they ain't Muslims). Over the past three years, Russian oil exports have risen an average of about 50,000 bbl/day, and the new fields proven in both Siberia and (especially) in the Sea of Okhotsk pretty much have people convinced that they have bazillions of barrels worth in the ground. The new private oil companies are pretty free from the Kremlin's control, so even though the government controls the pipelines, they don't control production at the wellhead, and we are seeing more and more trucks and rail (which are also no longer under tight control of the government) shipping the oil to whomever has the euros, yen, yuan, or dollars.

Traditionally, the Saudis have managed to adjust oil prices by either turning their spigots on or off; the other OPEC countries (including Venezuela) have gone along. But Russia isn't part of OPEC, they have the infrastructure in place, they have proven reserves for high production for a century, and they need the money! If the Russians start to sell off large volumes of oil (thus driving the prices down), the Saudis could well try to undercut Russian profits by pumping more oil and driving the price down further, thus cutting Russian short-term profits until they decide that it's best to play along with OPEC.

The problem is that the Russians aren't interested in profits twenty years from now; they need the money now. The Saudis are playing checkers with a race of chess champions, and they will probably lose.

You can bet that scares the snot out of the Saudis. If they lose their preeminence as the world's major petroleum player, it will have devastating economic results. That will possibly lead to more disaffected youth, and the Saudi monarchy, already corrupt and weak, could get swept away by an Islamist radical movement. At that point, of course, the new government, based on hatred of things Western, won't be a constraining factor in the Israel problem; indeed, they'd probably squander their wealth on a super-intifada, and you'd have a muezzin calling the Faithful to prayer from downtown Tel Aviv faster than you could say "Allah akbar!"

The Saudis, as well as all the other sheikhs driving around in their airconditioned Mercedeses, have a good memory. We may not remember the name Reza Pahlevi, but they sure do!

The bottom line is that no matter what happens, there will be interesting times and roller-coaster prices for oil over the next ten to twenty years. Whether we follow the trail of the Japanese and bet the farm on a Russian future is questionable (although we probably should). But the whole business about attacking Iraq because of oil imports is just a red herring, and my guess is that Makow knows that and is just spewing chemtrail-juice in an effort to get the sheeple to buy his books.

Either that, or he's full of it.

posted 03-27-2002 01:51 PM               

However one must remember that there has never before been an incident in which a Boeing has ever struck a building before and therefor we have nothing to compare it to. Even Duncan would agree that when planes crash, they skip across the ground or water they break into pieces and decelerate much slower. There are no large sections of wreckage in this case because the plane hit a solid object and disintegrated.

You must also take into consideration that this was not just any solid object, it was the military nerve center of a major superpower - and one that was most likely built to withstand severe conditions. Also, as far as I know jet fuel burns really hot. Hot enough in fact to melt the aluminum that the jet was constructed of. I'm not sure about how much aluminum that one of these jets is constructed out of, but I am sure that a considerable amount of it is.

According to the reports, the fire had burned for quite a while before it was brought under control and part of the building even collapsed on top of where the wreckage would have been. Now if you take an aluminum can and either put a torch up to it or throw it into a fire, the aluminum does not melt but actually disintegrates.

posted 03-27-2002 04:04 PM               

As you can see by the pictures, there's not much left that looks like a jet. Fortunately in this crash, there was only the crew on board and no one on the ground was injured.

posted 03-27-2002 05:07 PM               

This article just out today. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,674708,00.html

The US is taking contract bids in Qatar for moving their base from Saudi. We have seen deceptive lip service time and time again, but in the end, money and promised favors usually talk and get a desired result. Telling the truth has little meaning to these people; press releases are just a means to stall and/or manipulate public perception. If behind the scenes bribery does not work, some "event" or big story will occur to help create outrage and sway public opinion. Imagine all the discussions and arm-twisting behind the scenes. They are pulling out all the stops to get Iraq next. CNN, FOX, and other mainstream media propaganda machines are supporting their efforts full-steam on a daily basis.

What worries me the most (aside from blatant imperialism and running up a huge war-debt) are the unknowns, which may be created by an invasion of Iraq or other countries. The people in control cannot control all variables, yet they seem willing to accept possibly heavy retribution "collateral damage", including American or other lives outside of the military, and outside of the country they are attacking.

posted 03-27-2002 07:32 PM            

But unless we have a client or three ready to do the heavy lifting on the ground for us (like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan), we will have to go in on the ground and topple Saddam ourselves. I believe that the American people will put up with heavy casualties if they can be convinced that the 'sacrifice' is in good cause (e.g., stopping terrorism), but if there is no obvious payoff, it will be Vietnam all over again. Being in the military in the 1960s was no fun at all -- been there, done that.

Who would we get to go in on the ground? Unlike Afghanistan, there is no organized domestic anti-government forces that I know about. Sure, there is a 'democratic resistance' but they don't have an army and they're mostly in exile. The Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the south hate Saddam, but they hardly count for much. Face it, the Ba'ath operatives are everywhere, and, unless we can get Saddam's military to overthrow him (they remember what a beating they took last time, but a lot of them have been purged), I don't see any help from anybody.

I suppose some of the more 'exotic' of Bush's advisors are at least thinking of Iran. Iran and Iraq detest each other, and the main reason we helped Saddam in his 1980's war agains the Persians was that we wanted to punish them for the taking of our Embassy in the seventies. But Iran, despite the more moderating influence of Khatami, is still pretty anti-'great Satan', so they're probably out of the picture too.

If we just bomb the snot out of their infrastructure, we STILL wouldn't be able to get all their weapons plants, and, even if we killed The Moustache, there are a bunch of Ba'athists right behind him to take over.

And, of course, any attack on Saddam, hated as he is throughout the Arab world, will raise the stakes and anti-American fervor even higher, with plenty of jihad-boys ready to die just for the opportunity to bloody our nose once again.

Just from a geopolitical point of view, an attack on Iraq doesn't seem to make sense unless we can solve the Israel problem first.

Frankly, I don't see any winning situation in any of this. I just wish my kid weren't of an age to go into the military. So far, every single war in the 20th century had a Kunz in it -- grandpa in WWI, Dad in WWII, me in Vietnam, and a nephew in Kuwait. I sure would like to break THAT chain!

posted 03-28-2002 01:18 PM               

Agreed. My point too. There is no reason to invade and take out Saddam that can be tied to 9/11. Heck knows they have tried to link him, but there is no evidence. The US has been content to let Saddam be in power for the last ten years, while bombing Iraq at will and letting a lot of people starve, with hardly a mention of weapons of mass destruction. So, there has to be another reason. I would have to guess that relations with Saudi Arabia have been going sour over the years. Maybe they are getting greedier, maybe they are harder to manipulate, maybe 'we' are getting greedier. But, the powers that be have decided they want something in Iraq, maybe oil, maybe military bases, maybe both. The US government can drum up fervor amongst the ignorant just by issuing sound-bites and press releases...communist expansion in Vietnam, abuse of women in Afghanistan, axis of evil, war on drugs, terrorist... or, by taking advantage of events to fight wars...the sinking of the Maine, the sinking of the Lusitania, pearl harbor, invasion of Kuwait, 9/11, almost staged terrorism in the Mexican congress within the last few months. Pearl Harbor was the most obvious retaliation of course, yet history shows that Roosevelt knew about the impending attack and allowed it to happen, and thousands of American lives were lost and sacrificed as a result. Modern investigation has shown that a sinking of the Maine by a mine was highly unlikely, but the US annexed many possessions due to the war, including Hawaii. The US ambassador to Iraq told Saddam that "Arab affairs are none of our business" just before he invaded Kuwait, what a trap. The list goes on, it's an old, old trick...scream bloody murder, push the envelope beyond the scope of the original incident, and grab all you can. They are grabbing really big this time...a never-ending war against anything they choose to call a 'terrorist' or 'terrorism', including domestic citizens I fear. They have big plans in mind, funded by our money, and the blood of our youth.

The current administration has rumbled lately about using nukes if necessary. Perhaps they are planning to use 'mini' nukes against Iraq and other countries to speed up their war, break the enemy, use less troops, and suffer less casualties. All they need to do is find the right provocation to placate the public. How dangerous of a plan.

In closing, read this and look who signed it almost five years ago… key members of the current administration knew each other had these plans in mind a long time ago. Now they have the power to try to make their principles work. http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

posted 03-30-2002 05:08 PM            

Quote from Caesar
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.

And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.

How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." -- Julius Caesar