How Noble in Reason! How Infinite in Faculties!

[Guest fountainhall]

Know someone whom you’d describe as “tender, gentle, kind, with refined feelings, even when life (is) hard," someone who shows “great loyalty”?

 

Nope? Well maybe you did know someone with those splendid qualities but who has passed away. Nope again?

 

Well, how about asking the families of the 9/11 victims or the Nairobi bombings or the USS Cole incident? For the man so described is none other than Osama Bin Laden! The man who eulogises him in a new 2-part vdo is the new terrorist-in-chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former No. 2 in al-Qaeda.

 

Zawahiri said he had created the video to show Bin Laden's "human side" and tell people about his great loyalty.

 

He adds that Bin Laden was devoted to his children, paying great attention to ensuring that they were well-educated, despite constantly moving from place to place.

 

"Everyone close to him saw the fine and noble education in his children," he said, adding that Bin Laden employed a teacher who would threaten to beat the children with a stick to teach them the Koran.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15750813

 

What a load of bs! And we still don’t know why many of this mass murderer’s relatives were secretly flown out of the US in the hours after the 911 attacks when US airspace had been ordered closed for days, all with the approval of the leader of the country which had just been attacked. Bizarre!

 

(with apologies to Shakespeare for using his words in the title to this thread!)

[Bob]

And we still don

[Guest fountainhall]

I am not sure any of us yet knows exactly what happened in the days following 9/11 regarding the flights permitted to depart the USA with Saudis and bin Laden relations on Board (although I admit my error is stating "hours' instead of "days"), starting with the confusion that surrounded these flights, their actual number and their occupants, and continuing through the publication of the Official 9/11 Report. In this, at page 396, all 28 pages of Part Four “Funding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters” were redacted – i.e. the pages are there, but they are blank.

 

Congress’s Joint Inquiry, its co-chair Bob Graham told the authors, had found evidence “that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers. . . . It’s my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States. By ‘the Saudis,’ I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government—which includes all of the elite in the country.” Those involved, in Graham’s view, “included the royal family” and “some groups that were close to the royal family.” Was it credible that members of the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation? “I think,” the former senator said, “that they did in fact take actions that were complicit with the hijackers.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/08/9-11-2011-201108

 

The above is an excerpt from a long article from the Vanity Fair August 2011 edition titled “The Kingdom and the Towers”. It continues –

 

Bob Graham and his Republican co-chairman, former senator Richard Shelby, felt strongly that the bulk of the withheld material could and should have been made public. So did Representative Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democrat in the House. Shelby said, “My judgment is that 95 percent of that information should be declassified, become uncensored, so the American people would know.”

 

Know what? “I can’t tell you what’s in those pages,” the Joint Inquiry’s staff director, Eleanor Hill, said. “I can tell you that the chapter deals with information that our committee found in the F.B.I. and C.I.A. files that was very disturbing. It had to do with sources of foreign support for the hijackers.” The focus of the material, leaks to the press soon established, had been Saudi Arabia.

The article is based on research by British investigative reporters Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan for their book, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, which has just been published by Ballantine Books. The essence of their argument is that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attack in several ways, including nurturing the hijackers. At the start of the article, they write this –

 

The idea that al-Qaeda had not acted alone was there from the start. “The terrorists do not function in a vacuum,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters the week after 9/11. “I know a lot, and what I have said, as clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people.” Pressed to elaborate, Rumsfeld was silent for a long moment. Then, saying it was a sensitive matter, he changed the subject.

The article details the extremely strained relations between the USA and Saudi Arabia in the months and weeks leading up to 9/11, when a break in relations looked a distinct possibility – and with it, uncertainty regarding oil shipments. Crown Prince Abdullah had even gone as far as turning down an invitation to the White House. As to the flights, the article continues – suggesting in the final sentence that the FBI acknowledged it did not in fact have all the information it might have wanted from the fleeing Saudis:

 

Royal and rich Saudis scrambled to get out of the United States and return home. Seventy-five royals and their entourage, ensconced at Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas, decamped within hours of the attacks to the Four Seasons. They felt “extremely concerned for their personal safety,” they explained to the local F.B.I. field office, and bodyguards apparently deemed the Four Seasons more secure.

 

In Washington, Saudis who wished to leave included members of the bin Laden family. One of Osama’s brothers, never named publicly, had hastily called the Saudi Embassy wanting to know where he could best go to be safe. He was installed in a room at the Watergate Hotel and told to stay there until advised that transportation was available. Across the country, more than 20 bin Laden family members and staff were getting ready to leave.

 

In Lexington, Kentucky, the mecca of Thoroughbred racing in America, Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of King Fahd’s, had been attending the annual yearling sales. After the attacks, Ahmed quickly began to round up members of his family for a return to Saudi Arabia. He ordered his son and a couple of friends, who were in Florida, to charter a plane and get themselves to Lexington to connect with the plane he was taking home. They managed it, one of them told the security man hired for the flight, because “his father or his uncle was good friends with George Bush Sr.”

 

Late on the night of the 13th, Prince Bandar’s assistant called the F.B.I.’s assistant director for counterterrorism, Dale Watson. He needed help, the assistant said, in getting bin Laden “family members” out of the country. Watson said Saudi officials should call the White House or the State Department. The request found its way to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, who has acknowledged that he gave the go-ahead for the flights. He has said he has “no recollection” of having cleared it with anyone more senior in the administration.

 

An F.B.I. memo written two years after the exodus appears to acknowledge that some of the departing Saudis may have had information pertinent to the investigation.

For almost 3 years, the Bush administration, having admitted to six flights, absolutely denied there was a 7th, the Lear jet with 3 passengers alluded to in the 3rd paragraph above. Even the 9/11 Commission was kept in the dark.

 

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/06/09/Tampabay/TIA_now_verifies_flig.shtml

 

Anthony Summers is an investigative journalist known for his books suggesting conspiracy theories surrounding famous personalities, including the assassination of JFK, and the lives and deaths of Frank Sinatra J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and Marilyn Monroe. But The Eleventh Day has gathered a good deal of critical praise. One of the 9/11 Commission staffers, Miles Kara, has stated –

 

“The Eleventh Day is a game-changer. It is the new definitive timeline for 9/11, a superb and detailed extension of the work of the 9/11 Commission and Congress’ Joint Inquiry."

[KhorTose]

(with apologies to Shakespeare for using his words in the title to this thread!)

 

"What a piece of work is a man" was definitely written by the Earl of Oxford (Edward DeVere) whose two cousins were named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to whom the character Hamlet addresses in this speech.

[Bob]

As to the flights, the article continues

[Guest fountainhall]

"What a piece of work is a man" was definitely written by the Earl of Oxford

A timely plug for the new movie Anonymous!

 

With a conspiracy theory made up of bricks like that, I'd wear a hard hat entering that bastion . . . But those tossing flares into the sky suggesting that there's something "awfully fishy" about why the US government allowed the in-country Saudis to leave helps to perpetuate the existence of the few nuts that actually believe that the US government itself had something to do with the attacks that Bin Laden set in motion.

Yet the problem with governments withholding information which then slowly leaks out, I'd suggest, is that more often than not the facts do not appear to match up with the fiction previously spun. That inevitably leads to theories - conspiracy or otherwise.

 

As I said, I do not believe any of us even now know the true story of 9/11. I believe the Bush administration actually was complicit in the attacks, in that it deliberately ignored, for whatever reasons, a host of information which would have given it a fairly accurate picture of what was likely to happen. A very thorough investigation could then have been undertaken before the catastrophe happened. Granted, history records many other instances where 20/20 hindsight would have changed the course of events. In this case, though, it does seem clear the administration had its sights set on different goals.

 

Be that as it may, the truth of Saudi involvement or not will remain shrouded in doubt as long as such facts as were known remain locked away. On which point, one 'truth' I think we'd like to know is who really killed JFK and why. And if it was, as we've been told, Lee Harvey Oswald operating as a lone assassin without any organisation backing him, why were the files locked away until, I think, 2017? What is in them that the US does not want its public to see? And will the files actually be opened, or further embargoed until all those alive in 1963 are six feet underground?

[Rogie]

The article details the extremely strained relations between the USA and Saudi Arabia in the months and weeks leading up to 9/11, when a break in relations looked a distinct possibility – and with it, uncertainty regarding oil shipments. Crown Prince Abdullah had even gone as far as turning down an invitation to the White House.

I don't know how influential the Bin Laden family were In Arabia, but they must have been very wealthy. The Saudis have a very powerful tool at their disposal in the form of withdrawing their cooperation, for example the screening of . . .

 

Death of a Princess is a British 1980 drama-documentary, produced by ATV, produced in cooperation with WGBH in the United States. The drama, be based on the true story of Princess Masha'il, is the story of a young princess from Saudi Arabia Islamic nation and her lover who had been publicly executed for adultery.

. . . had serious consequences:

 

The British Ambassador to Riyadh, James Craig, was asked to leave the country, restrictions were placed on the issuing of visas to British businessmen, and Saudi Arabia, along with Lebanon, banned British Airways' Concorde from its airspace, making its flights between London and Singapore economically unremunative. While the Saudi response had initially driven a UK press reaction against the attempted censorship, when export orders began to be cancelled, the press began to question whether it had been right to show the film

http://en.wikipedia....h_of_a_Princess

[Guest fountainhall]

I don't know how influential the Bin Laden family were In Arabia, but they must have been very wealthy.

The bin Laden family owns one of the biggest construction groups in Saudi Arabia and the entire Middle East. Reports suggest it has largely been favoured since it rebuilt the holy city of Mecca at its own expense before Saudi Arabia became rich on its oil wealth. King Faisal thereafter issued a royal decree awarding all future construction projects to bin Laden's construction company. As a result, the company eventually amassed assets in excess of US$5 billion.

 

Its business and financial ties cover not only Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, but many other countries, including in Europe. Here is part of a lengthy article on the relationship between the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family.

 

The relationship between the bin Ladens and the Saudi royal family is quite exceptional in that it not simply one of business ties: it is also a relationship of trust, of friendship and of shared secrets. This is particularly the case with regard to the group's present-day leaders and the Soudairi clan.

 

Thanks to the renovation of Mecca, Sheik Mohammed bin Laden did not become merely King Abdul Aziz' official contractor, but his friend and confidant as well. This friendship has been handed down to their children. The bin Laden sons went to the same schools as the numerous offspring of King Abdul Aziz and they all followed the same path.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/family.html

 

Let me add two more excerpts from the Vanity Fair article mentioned in my earlier post. Years after a meeting with Saudi domestic Intelligence chief, Prince Naif,

 

. . . in two long conversations with Jean-Charles Brisard, author of a study on terrorist financing for a French intelligence agency, (US counterterrorism chief John) O’Neill was still venting his frustration. “All the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization,” he said, “are in Saudi Arabia.” The answers and the clues, however, remained out of reach, in part, O’Neill told Brisard, because U.S. dependence on Saudi oil meant that Saudi Arabia had “much more leverage on us than we have on the kingdom.” And, he added, because “high-ranking personalities and families in the Saudi kingdom” had close ties to bin Laden.

 

These conversations took place in June and late July of 2001.

Three weeks before 9/11, enraged by television footage of an Israeli soldier putting his boot on the head of a Palestinian woman, (Crown Prince Abdullah) had snapped. (Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan), the Crown Prince’s nephew, was told to deliver an uncompromising message to President Bush.

 

“I reject this extraordinary, un-American bias whereby the blood of an Israeli child is more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian child. . . . A time comes when peoples and nations part. . . . Starting today, you go your way and we will go our way. From now on, we will protect our national interests, regardless of where America’s interests lie in the region.” There was more, much more, and it rocked the Bush administration. The president responded with a placatory letter that seemed to go far toward the Saudi position of endorsing the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Three weeks later, on 2nd October 2001, the BBC reported this -

 

President George W Bush has said the creation of a Palestinian state had always been part of the United States' vision for the Middle East . . . His comments followed reports from Washington that, prior to the terror attacks on 11 September, the Bush administration had been planning a new Middle East initiative - including support for the creation of a Palestinian state.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1575090.stm

 

Draw your own conclusions!

[Bob]

As I said, I do not believe any of us even now know the true story of 9/11. I believe the Bush administration actually was complicit in the attacks, in that it deliberately ignored, for whatever reasons, a host of information which would have given it a fairly accurate picture of what was likely to happen.

 

It's my view that anyone who's fairly read the newspapers in the years following 9/11 knows the "true" story of what happened (to the extent that anything can be known). Saying otherwise is simply baseless conjecture.

 

And, while I strongly disliked Bush, Jr., and detested some of the neo-cons (such as Cheney and Wolfowitz) surrounding him, even I wouldn't make the claim that any of them "deliberately ignored" information that might have led the government to avert the attacks. Do you really think it's fair to use words like that ("deliberately ignored") without any reasonable basis in fact to do so?

 

And saying the Bush administration was "complicit in the attacks" - under any type of context - is absolutely beyond me. Even Bush's harshest political enemies wouldn't use that kind of language. It's inflamatory, baseless, and just plain wrong.

[Guest fountainhall]

It's my view that anyone who's fairly read the newspapers in the years following 9/11 knows the "true" story of what happened (to the extent that anything can be known). Saying otherwise is simply baseless conjecture.

I’m sorry, but I just do not agree – especially with regard to 9/11. History has frequently shown that governments the world over do lie and do spin – until such time as they begin to be caught out, whereafter the spin merchants go into overdrive. I do accept we have learned a great deal about 9/11, much of it which the Bush administration tried initially to withhold. But, at the risk of incurring your ire, I for one believe there is more. Why? I cannot explain in a way that would satisfy you. Merely experience based on reading about major events over many decades when governments have similarly sought to withhold information from the public.

 

As to information being “deliberately ignored”, much probably depends on precisely how you define those two words. I choose to interpret them fairly broadly as, for example, on the issue of the much commented on Presidential Daily Brief of Saturday 10 August 2001 - and specifically comments made by the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. It is a tax-exempt public charity, receives no U.S. government funding and its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals. (On March 17, 2000, Long Island University named the National Security Archive as winner of a Special George Polk Award for 1999 for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy" and "serving as an essential journalistic resource.")

 

Let’s look at the Archive’s summary of that PDB (updated on 12 April 2004) –

 

President Bush on Saturday, 10 April 2004, became the first sitting president ever to release publicly even a portion of his Daily Brief from the CIA. The page-and-a-half section of the President's Daily Brief from 6 August 2001, headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," had generated the most contentious questioning in last week's testimony by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before the commission investigating the September 11th attacks. Dr. Rice continued to insist that the Brief did not amount to a real warning, while several commissioners seemed to think otherwise.

 

These contrasting interpretations dominated the weekend's news. For example, President Bush commented on Sunday that the "PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America - well, we knew that. … The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what." Meanwhile, the Sunday news analysis in The New York Times began with the following summary: "In a single 17-sentence document, the intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush in August 2001 spells out the who, hints at the what and points towards the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that followed 36 days later."

The analysis then goes on to list several very specific examples of officials “deliberately” obscuring and even denying certain aspects of the PDB in 2002 and 2004. It then goes further and lists TEN statements made by government officials regarding the PDB which are “myths” -

 

Standing in the way of this common sense approach, however, are myths and misinformation about the President's Daily Brief - put forward by the White House, CIA, and even the 9-11 commission's own chairman - that, in Mark Twain's phrase, have gone twice around the world while the truth was putting on its shoes.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/index.htm

(underlining, boldface and italics from the original article)

 

You may read the full report on the above site. But in the light of the factual evidence it puts forward, I say again that the Bush administration deliberately elected to ignore that advice – in other words, failed to give it the priority it demanded by assuming, I imagine, it was just more of the same (my thoughts).

 

We know that much of the Bush administration's emphasis prior to, and even more after, 9/11 was Iraq, with officials including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and others spinning lies. Perhaps there were grains of truth amongst them – that always helps! – but they were lies nonetheless. And the vast majority of the US public bought them. Heck, even the US Congress bought most of them and gave the President virtual carte blanche to go to war with Iraq on pretexts that we now know to be, shall we say, pretty far from the truth.

 

If, in the words of the New York Times quoted above, you as President choose to dismiss a document which “spells out the who, hints at the what and points towards the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington,” that to me implies being complicit – through failure to take the actions necessary to investigate and prevent such attacks. And as we all know from the newspapers, there were for many months glaring clues galore, there were administration officials virtually screaming for the President’s ear, and so on – but the administration and its agencies responsible for the security of the United States failed to join up the dots, despite the abundance of warnings. But then, of course, we now know the administration had other priorities at that time!

[Bob]

No ire from me but that doesn't mean I agree at all with your analysis (well, conjecture). We've got enough of what we sometimes call "conspiracy nuts" in the US and it'd be nice if we could convince our British friends to spend more time worrying about what the British government does rather than what they think the US government is withholding from its own citizens.

 

With respect to events prior to 9/11, there have been some legitimate arguments that our intelligence services (along with the FBI) could have put 2 + 2 together had there been more coordination of the services but that's simply hindsight and flyspecking certain data (much like picking out one small part of one daily briefing as you have done). The word "deliberate" you used expresses intentional conduct and that's where I part company from your allegations. While I can understand someone arguing incompetence, deliberate conduct is way off the chart in my view. And untrue (or, perhaps better said, there's no rational basis to believe it is true).

 

Frankly, most of our politicians and technocrats are just too damn dumb to keep a true secret for very long. And if it's a secret that could ruin somebody's career or reputation, that's almost sure to come out in the wash. Credible in-the-know authors/journalists such as Bernstein and others have dug as deep as you can into the subjects you raise and even they don't hint at or suggest that there were deliberate or intentional failures or mistakes with respect to so-called warnings leading up to the 9/11 attacks. That's good enough for me.

[Rogie]

History has frequently shown that governments the world over do lie and do spin –

Yes they do and that's why people should make it their business to hold them to account, whether it be somebody with a proven track record shouting form the rooftops such as Bernstein (mentioned by Bob) or somebody writing for a tiny audience on a humble Message Board such as this. From what little I know about Thai politics and the media many journalists are happy to trot out the party line but it seems few are prepared to stick their necks out. Unfortunately, by so doing they are likely to be taking certain risks, risks that shouldn't be a factor in a democratic country such as Thailand, although as we know democracy comes in many flavours.

 

No ire from me but that doesn't mean I agree at all with your analysis (well, conjecture). We've got enough of what we sometimes call "conspiracy nuts" in the US and it'd be nice if we could convince our British friends to spend more time worrying about what the British government does rather than what they think the US government is withholding from its own citizens.

As a Brit I agree we have plenty of homegrown (or imported from Europe!) woes right now. But you have to allow Bob that Britain is a mere dwarf compared with America, so by the law of averages America will have many more incidents that impinge on the world stage, and it would be quite unfair to say citizens of another country cannot comment and should mind their own business.

 

In addition the book mentioned by Fountainhall, The Eleventh Day, has recently been published and so the events surrounding 9/11 are a hot topic. Whether the book really is a 'game-changer' I have no idea, I shan't be reading it myself as I am not particularly interested, and indeed in the reviews on Amazon some smart aleck is saying there's nothing new in it that wasn't aleady known (or could have been deduced), but be that as it may if somebody alleges something happened and the person or people who were supposed to have done it deny it, how much further can anybody else go to challenge it?

 

That's good enough for me.

Fair enough, and also fair game to challenge anyone departing from the 'consensus' to prove it! However, speculation is not a crime and it is human nature to do that. No one is forced to indulge and provided it is intelligently argued and not idle gossip long may folks have that right.

[Guest fountainhall]

it'd be nice if we could convince our British friends to spend more time worrying about what the British government does rather than what they think the US government is withholding from its own citizens.

Like Rogie, I'm with you on this one. I'm just old enough to remember the PR debacle surrounding the curious case of Commander 'Buster' Crabb. The Soviet leaders of the day, Bulganin and Kruschev, were visiting Britain. MI6 recruited then freelance frogman Crabb to secretly reconnoitre and investigate their Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze. This boasted a new design which the Brits were desperate to know more about. On April 16 1956, Crabb dived into Portsmouth harbour - and was never seen again. Naturally the Brits denied everything. The Soviets announced they had seen a frogman near their ship. British newspapers speculated that Soviets had captured Crabb and taken him to the Soviet Union.

 

Some 14 months later, a body missing its head and both hands clad in a frogman's suit was found in the sea. No-one could positively identify the body. Nevertheless, the coroner said he was satisfied the body was that of Crabb.

 

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden . . . told MPs it was not in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which the frogman met his end.

As information was declassified under the 50-year rule new facts on Crabb's disappearance came to light. On 27 October 2006, the National Archives released papers relating to the fatal Ordzhonikidze mission. On 9 November 2007, The Independent reported how the government had covered up the death of 'Buster' Crabb.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Crabb

 

More recently there has been the sad but curious case of the death of British scientist and expert on biological warfare, Dr. David Hutton. Employed by the British Ministry of Defence, and formerly a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, Hutton allegedly committed suicide in the wake of the national discussion over the government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Someone, almost certainly in government (shades of Valerie Plame in the US?), leaked his name and a pubic furore erupted. Most Britons suspected he'd been murdered. Two enquiries confirmed the verdict of suicide. But not everyone is satisfied.

 

one physician, Dr Michael Powers QC, has not accepted the published postmortem and toxicology report and is continuing to maintain that questions remain about the amount of blood found at the scene and the number of pills taken.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

 

So the UK government has not escaped its fair share of lying and spinning!

[Rogie]

A bit of a cliche I know but the phrase New World order comes to mind.

 

Qatar, the tiny Gulf state that has turned into a big player in the Great Game

 

. . . In the old world order, there were only two powers whose interventions counted: America and Russia. Today, the US can no longer claim exclusive rights to a policy of using money and troops to win friends and influence people. It may surprise us that some of the new players in the Great Game are the size of a squashed pea. But it shouldn't shock us that they want to have their say.

 

The Islamist connection is red rag to the world's two leading sources of conspiracy theory. The Left points to the West's close friendship with Qatar, which is home to 13,000 US troops and its Central Command, and says this is part of a capitalist plot to sabotage Arab democracy in the interests of Western oil supplies. The Right says that President Obama has been suckered into laying the ground for a new wave of Islamic conquest – more pacific than al-Qaeda, maybe, but no less hostile to Western principles.

 

These theories can be partly true without being conspiracies. Yes, Washington has had ideological problems with Qatar. But presidents have taken the view that since Islamism is the region's dominant ideology, it is better to do business with Islamic rulers who have a vested interest in taking on nihilistic regimes, whether secular (Gaddafi) or religious (the Taliban). Qatar practises an Islam that is devout but not so oppressive as to ban bars, women drivers, or other religions, and is promising to ensure that the region's tumultuous revolutions toe the democratic line. Whether you are on the Left, Right or centre, that sounds like the sort of friend the US should be making.

 

WARNING! If the sight of royalty sporting a wondrous array of headgear offends, do not click on the link.

 

http://www.telegraph...Great-Game.html

[Bob]

Our governments or subsections of same sometimes come up with the most god awful ideas. Recently, our ATF (Alcohol, Firearms & Tabacco) was engaged in an operation dubbed "Fast and Furious" to attempt to trace weapons to the higher echelons of the Mexican drug cartels. To do that, the bozos (ATF agents) furnished thousands of weapons (including some exceptionally nasty ones)across the border into Mexico to lower-level drug dealers. So....not that anybody should have "thunk" of this at the time....the ATF loses track of hundreds of these guns, mant of which have been linked with many violent crimes (including the murder of a border agent) within the US (god only knows how many crimes or deaths occurred within Mexico itself due to all these guns).

 

They get an "A" for the intent to hunt down the higher echelons but, of course, they get less than an "F" for coming up with this wacky idea as to how to do it. Come on, you don't give thousands of dangerous weapons to a bunch of drug dealers in Mexico (or is that too obvious!)! The surviving relatives of the border patrol agent must lay awake at night wondering why the hell their relative died from a gun given to drug dealers by their own damn government.

 

I'm sure the US and British governments actually have come up with some really bright ideas lately; unfortunately, I can't think of any at the moment.

[Rogie]

Our governments or subsections of same sometimes come up with the most god awful ideas.

Assuming that's public knowledge how did it become so? Did the government make a clean breast of it or were the details teased out by prying 'meddlers'? I have to say Bob if you'd written that on 1st April it'd like to think I wouldn't have fallen for it.

[Guest fountainhall]

I'm sure the US and British governments actually have come up with some really bright ideas lately; unfortunately, I can't think of any at the moment.

Nor can I. But surely the Razzie for the wackiest idea goes to none other than Thaksin during his time as PM when he arranged for the 'bombing' of the south of the country with 100 million 'birds'. The aim, we were all told, was to foster peace. Huh? The 'birds' were paper origami imitations. All this palaver happened only two weeks after his government had murdered almost 80 Muslim protestors by throwing them tied up onto the back of an open truck and leaving them there like cattle for more than 8 hours in the burning sun.

 

Said the admired leader -

 

"The paper birds will send a message to local people in the deep south that Thais in other parts of the country love and care about them." Mr. Thaksin said his origami bird was a symbol of peace and caring, and he would try to fold more during his overseas trip to this weekend's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in Chile. "I'll have time while on the flight to Chile, and I will make more," he said.

http://www.thailandqa.com/forum/showthread.php?5355-Thai-leader-kicks-off-paper-birds-for-peace-campai

 

He obviously did not make enough, for this futile attempt at papering over cracks had zero effect. Nor, by the way, had he done his homework.

 

The Muslim population saw the “peace gesture” differently. “The Islamic understanding of dropping birds is battle,” Dr. Chaiwat Satha-Anand, a political science professor at Bangkok’s Thammasat University told me. He pointed to Sura 105 of the Quran, “The Elephant,” in which God sends down “birds in flocks” upon his enemies to flatten them like blades of grass.

http://zenpundit.com/?p=3690