quote:

Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN don't forget my favourite: flight 77 didn't hit the pentagon. that one takes the cake for me.

It probably did hit..but this amazing product has sowed doubt in some people's minds:

LINK

quote:

And then United 93 never happened?

You are the one stating this, I never mentioned United 93 never happened. What I do believe is that they definitely took out United 93 (shot it down) and that it did not crash because the passengers attempted to overtake the terrorists while in flight. Add another lie to the list of thousands to the official story.


Donald Rumsfeld says 9-11 plane 'shot down' in Pennsylvania


WASHINGTON – Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been questions about Flight 93, the ill-fated plane that crashed in the rural fields of Pennsylvania.

The official story has been that passengers on the United Airlines flight rushed the hijackers in an effort to prevent them from crashing the plane into a strategic target – possibly the U.S. Capitol.

During his surprise Christmas Eve trip to Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the flight being shot down – long a suspicion because of the danger the flight posed to Washington landmarks and population centers.

Was it a slip of the tongue? Was it an error? Or was it the truth, finally being dropped on the public more than three years after the tragedy of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000?


Donald Rumsfeld

Here's what Rumsfeld said Friday: "I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten – indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be."

Several eyewitnesses to the crash claim they saw a "military-type" plane flying around United Airlines Flight 93 when the hijacked passenger jet crashed – prompting the once-unthinkable question of whether the U.S. military shot down the plane.

Although the onboard struggle between hijackers and passengers – immortalized by the courageous "Let's roll" call to action by Todd Beamer – became one of the enduring memories of that disastrous day, the actual cause of Flight 93's crash, of the four hijacked airliners, remains the most unclear.

Several residents in and around Shanksville, Pa., describing the crash as they saw it, claim to have seen a second plane – an unmarked military-style jet.

Well-founded uncertainty as to just what happened to Flight 93 is nothing new. Just three days after the worst terrorist attack in American history, on Sept. 14, 2001, The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record newspaper reported that five eyewitnesses reported seeing a second plane at the Flight 93 crash site.

That same day, reported the Record, FBI Special Agent William Crowley said investigators could not rule out that a second plane was nearby during the crash. He later said he had misspoken, dismissing rumors that a U.S. military jet had intercepted the plane before it could strike a target in Washington, D.C.

Although government officials insist there was never any pursuit of Flight 93, they were informed the flight was suspected of having been hijacked at 9:16 am, fully 50 minutes before the plane came down.

On the Sept. 16, 2001, edition of NBC's "Meet the Press," Vice President Dick Cheney, while not addressing Flight 93 specifically, spoke clearly to the administration's clear policy regarding shooting down hijacked jets.

Vice President Cheney: "Well, the – I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft."

NBC's Tim Russert: "And you decided?"

Cheney: "We decided to do it. We'd, in effect, put a flying combat air patrol up over the city; F-16s with an AWACS, which is an airborne radar system, and tanker support so they could stay up a long time ...

"It doesn't do any good to put up a combat air patrol if you don't give them instructions to act, if, in fact, they feel it's appropriate."

Russert: "So if the United States government became aware that a hijacked commercial airline[r] was destined for the White House or the Capitol, we would take the plane down?"

Cheney: "Yes. The president made the decision ... that if the plane would not divert ... as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out. Now, people say, you know, that's a horrendous decision to make. Well, it is. You've got an airplane full of American citizens, civilians, captured by ... terrorists, headed and are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board?

"... It's a presidential-level decision, and the president made, I think, exactly the right call in this case, to say, I wished we'd had combat air patrol up over New York.'"

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42112

quote:

Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov Your story's about as straight as a fractured penis.

There's nothing straight at all about penis similees.

___________________
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

quote:

Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN wrong. the CIA had exactly nothing to do with bin laden during the soviet invasion. repeating this lie constantly doesn't make it any more truthful.

America provided resources to create the Mujahideen in late 70's in order to defeat the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the US left Mujahideen without any guide line and they divided into 2 groups (Taliban and the Northern Alliance). The Taliban are actually a product of the short lived romance between the US and Pakistan and is another name for Alqaeda. The US is responsible for creating this ideology and force.

Who trained Osama? Who dug the Tora Bora caves? Who supplied billions to the Hikmatyar and all other groups including Osama? Who supplied the ISI with money and weapons? who gave billions to the Taliban to occupy 90% of Afghanistan in just few months? Who gave them the chemical weapons? Commandos trained and coordinated the Talibans/Alqaeda.

I think this just goes to show that no matter what logic or reason you toss at people, you cannot wrest a fervent belief from them.

___________________
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

No CIA involvement here PKC, none what so ever.....don't read this, nothing to see.


The Breeding-Ground and Birth of Al-Qaeda


The USA, via the CIA, originally backed the Islamic guerrilla resistance against the Marxist regime and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s. Its efforts focused increasingly on a hardline faction which was to spawn al-Qaeda in 1987-88.

Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured in at least US $6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin [in Afghanistan]. Other western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more. ...

Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. ... Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.


"How the CIA created Osama bin Laden"


As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar ["Services Office"] — the MAK — which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.

What the CIA bio[graphy] conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation.

During Ronald Reagan's second term as President, the US effort was stepped up. Casey, the Irish-Catholic head of the CIA, projected a Christian-Islamic alliance against Soviet communism, and sought to extend the fight into the Soviet Union itself. Milton Bearden, who "had drawn close to Casey a few years earlier", became CIA station chief in Pakistan's capital Islamabad in July 1986.

More and more Arabs were arriving in Pakistan to fight alongside the Afghan resistance. Azzam and bin Laden's MAK financed and funneled these volunteers.

Overall, the U.S. government looked favorably on the Arab recruitment drives. ... Some of the most ardent cold warriors at [CIA headquarters at] Langley thought this program should be formally endorsed and extended. ... [T]he CIA "examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of international brigade," ... Robert Gates [then-head of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence] recalled. ... At the Islamabad station Milt Bearden felt that bin Laden himself "actually did some very good things" ... But nothing came of it ...
[Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), pp.145-6, 155-6.]

Milt Bearden was the CIA's station chief in Pakistan's capital Islamabad in 1986-89; as such he oversaw the agency's efforts to back the mujaheddin. He later said, "The CIA did not recruit Arabs. ... There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight." And the CIA denied any direct contact with bin Laden.
(Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2005 edn), pp.87, 147, 155-6, 208; Peter L Bergen, Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden [Weidenfield & Nicholson, London, 2001], pp.70-71; Tenet statement to the Joint Inquiry on 9/11, Oct. 17, 2002.)

But J. Michael Springmann, head of the non-immigrant visa section at the "CIA-dominated" US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1987-88, said he learned that the CIA had a "program to bring people to the United States for terrorist training, people recruited by the CIA and its asset Usama bin Laden, and the idea was to get them trained and send them back to Afghanistan to fight the then Soviets." "Their nationalities for the most part were Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese." These "recruits without backgrounds" were given visas over Springmann's protests.
(Transcript of Springmann interview, Fox TV, 18 July 2002, Center for Cooperative Research; transcript of Springmann interview with CBC, 3 July 2002, 9/11 Review )

On American soil, the CIA used Muslim charities and mosque communities as fronts for recruitment of fighters in their secret war against the USSR [Operation Cyclone] in the Hindu Kush. As Cooley writes in Unholy Wars: "One was in New York's Arab district, in Brooklyn along Atlantic Avenue ... Another was a private rifle club in an affluent community of Connecticut."

Bin Laden and a man named Mustafa Chalaby, who ran a jihad refugee centre in Brooklyn, were both protégés of Abdullah Azzam. ...

Cooley says that those directly recruited by the US went to Camp Peary — "the Farm", as the CIA's spy training centre in Virginia is known in the intelligence community ... At the Farm and other secret camps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries such as Egypt and Jordan learned strategic sabotage skills. Passed down to the younger jihad generation which filled the ranks of the bin Laden organisation, these skills would come back to haunt the US. ...'

[Giles Foden, "Blowback Chronicles", Guardian, 15 Sept. 2001; referring to John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press, no date given)]

The MAK, headed by the Palestinian-Egyptian Abdullah Azzam in conjunction with bin Laden, was based in Peshawar, Pakistan. Numerous branches were established in the USA under the name of al-Khifa. The first was set up in Tucson, amid the large Arab community there, in 1986. The 9/11 Commission's Report later noted that "A number of important al Qaeda figures attended the University of Arizona in Tucson or lived in Tucson in the 1980s and early 1990s".

The largest branch of al-Khifa was in Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue, New York (in or next to the Farouq Mosque). Other branches were in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. Officially known as the al-Khifa Refugee Center and the associated Afghan Refugee Services, the Brooklyn centre provided the interface for "Operation Cyclone", the American effort to support the mujaheddin. The organization became known as the "Services Office", after its Peshawar original, and worked to raise funds and train recruits for the war effort.

Azzam is believed to have visited from time to time, and bin Laden was numbered among the financial supporters. Al-Khifa had a training camp (perhaps the "private rifle club") in Connecticut, where "Recruits received brief paramilitary training and weapons induction, according to evidence in [subsequent terrorist] trials". Several former members of the "active service" of the CIA were employed there as "expert consultants".

(Andrew Marshall, "Terror 'blowback' burns CIA: America's spies paid and trained their nation's worst enemies", Independent on Sunday [UK], 1 Nov. 1998; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), p.155; 9/11 Commission Report, chapter 2, p.58 [HTML version]; ibid, chapter 7, p.226 [HTML version]; Richard Labévière, Dollars For Terror [Algora, 2000; translation of Les Dolleurs de la Terreur, Grasset, 1999], pp.223-4)

In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques, (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built "training camps", some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.

These camps, now dubbed "terrorist universities" by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers. ...

Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden's organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company — albeit one that integrates the operations of a military force and related logistical services with `legitimate' business operations.

Bin Laden split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan. ... Afghan vet[eran]s, or Afghanis ...

As the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan during 1988-9, a policy split emerged between the US State Department and the CIA. The State Department focused on moderate Afghan factions and a negotiated supersession of the Soviet-installed Najibullah regime. But the CIA continued military support, via Pakistan, of Hekmatyar and other Islamists. Meanwhile, Arabs continued to flow in to fight alongside the Afghan Islamists.

quote:

Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On I think this just goes to show that no matter what logic or reason you toss at people, you cannot wrest a fervent belief from them.

pretty much. its why i try to avoid this thread. completely immune to facts, history and logic. that cretinrot doesn't have a formal education becomes quite apparent with how he attempts to use his fallacious information.

___________________

quote:

Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN pretty much. its why i try to avoid this thread. completely immune to facts, history and logic. that cretinrot doesn't have a formal education becomes quite apparent with how he attempts to use his fallacious information.

reminds me of young earth creationism.

quote:

Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN pretty much. its why i try to avoid this thread. completely immune to facts, history and logic. that cretinrot doesn't have a formal education becomes quite apparent with how he attempts to use his fallacious information.

LOL, avoid the thread? You must be fucking joking, you have one of the highest post counts in here (mostly all fucking nonsense/trolling).

To prove my point you just did it again after I just schooled you on Al qaeda and it's creator the CIA. You must have nothing else to say because it is common knowledge but you always seem to over look these minor details while spitting out the usual mutter.

Tell us what exactly is a lie or not correct about the information I just posted on Al qaeda and the US/CIA involvement starting from the early 70's? I need some entertainment, go ahead...

quote:

Originally posted by culorut LOL, avoid the thread? You must be fucking joking, you have one of the highest post counts in here (mostly all fucking nonsense/trolling).

i post much much less in here than i used to. and instead of rising to the bait of your ignorance time and time again, ive been refraining of late. not all the time obviously, but more than i used to when id respond to just about every lie in here.

quote:

Originally posted by culorut To prove my point you just did it again after I just schooled you on Al qaeda and it's creator the CIA. You must have nothing else to say because it is common knowledge but you always seem to over look these minor details while spitting out the usual mutter.

see, this is where your lack of education is displayed in your inability to make logical inferences from the information you read. FYI - the mujahadeen =/ al qaida.

quote:

Originally posted by culorut Tell us what exactly is a lie or not correct about the information I just posted on Al qaeda and the US/CIA involvement starting from the early 70's? I need some entertainment, go ahead...

Firstly, the CIA didn't create shit. They provided training, arms and $$ to mujahideen fighters during the soviet invasion. These fighters already existed, the CIA didn't create a band of merry men, call them AQ and have been running them ever since. There were a multitude of stakeholders in the conflict in afghanistan, saying that CIA = mujahadeen is simplistic and displays a real lack of rounded information on your part. The mujahadeen that eventually became the taliban were a completely separate entity to al qaida and bin laden. The CIA never provided any assistance to osama bin laden or AQ. There is certainly no evidence at all to suggest OBL was a CIA asset from 1979 until 911, and your continued attempts to muddy the waters with "mujahadeen = taliban = al qaida" just shows a lack of education and honest commitment to research and an inability to display a mature regard for geo political issues and contexts.

Everything in your world is nice and simple with easy questions and even easier answers. The world doesn't work like that.

quote:

The U.S. government officials and a number of other parties maintain that the U.S. supported only the indigenous Afghan mujahideen. They deny that the CIA or other American officials had contact with the Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) or Bin Laden, let alone armed, trained, coached or indoctrinated them. They argue that with a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land; that with several hundred million dollars a year in funding from non-American, Muslim sources, Arab Afghans themselves would have no need for American funds; that Americans could not train mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of them to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan[11]; that the Afghan Arabs were militant Islamists, reflexively hostile to Westerners, and prone to threaten or attack Westerners even when they knew the Westerners were helping the mujahideen. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri says much the same thing in his book Knights Under the Prophet's Banner.[12] Bin Laden himself has said "the collapse of the Soviet Union ... goes to God and the mujahideen in Afghanistan ... the US had no mentionable role," but "collapse made the US more haughty and arrogant." [13] According to CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.[14] Bergen quotes Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran ISI's (Inter-Services Intelligence) Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987: It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.[15] Other sources also dispute the notion that the CIA had any contact with non-Afghan mujahideen.[16] Vincent Cannistraro, who led the Reagan administration's Afghan Working Group from 1985 to 1987, puts it, "The CIA was very reluctant to be involved at all. They thought it would end up with them being blamed, like in Guatemala." So the Agency tried to avoid direct involvement in the war, ... the skittish CIA, Cannistraro estimates, had less than ten operatives acting as America's eyes and ears in the region. Milton Bearden, the Agency's chief field operative in the war effort, has insisted that "[T]he CIA had nothing to do with" bin Laden. Cannistraro says that when he coordinated Afghan policy from Washington, he never once heard bin Laden's name.[17] Other reasons for the lack of any CIA-Afghan Arab connection, let alone one regarded as of "pivotal importance," was that the Afghan Arabs themselves lacked importance, being a "curious sideshow to the real fighting."[18] Estimates are that there were about a 250,000 Afghans fighting 125,000 Soviet troops, while only 2000 Arab Afghans fought "at any one time".[19] Marc Sageman, a Foreign Service Officer who was based in Islamabad from 1987-1989, and worked closely with Afghanistan's Mujahideen, says:[20] Contemporaneous accounts of the war do not even mention [the Afghan Arabs]. Many were not serious about the war. ... Very few were involved in actual fighting. For most of the war, they were scattered among the Afghan groups associated with the four Afghan fundamentalist parties. According to Milton Bearden the CIA did not recruit Arabs because there were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight. The Arab Afghan were not only superfluous but "disruptive," angering local Afghan with their more-Muslim-than-thou attitude.(Peter Jouvenal).[21] Veteran Afghan cameraman Peter Jouvenal quotes an Afghan mujahideen as saying "whenever we had a problem with one of them [foreign mujahideen], we just shot them. They thought they were kings." Many who traveled in Afghanistan - Olivier Roy,[22] Peter Jouvenal.[23] - reported of the Arab Afghans' visceral hostility to Westerners in Afghanistan to aid Afghans or report on their plight. BBC reporter John Simpson tells the story of running into Osama bin Laden in 1989, and with neither knowing who the other was, bin Laden attempting to bribe Simpson's Afghan driver $500 - a large sum in a poor country - to kill the infidel Simpson. When the driver declined, Bin Laden retired to his "camp bed" and wept "in frustration."

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

I might also add that even if we could prove that OBL received training or other assistance during the afghan war, that's isn't the same thing as being a covert CIA asset when he was involved with the 911 terrorist attacks 20 years+ later. such an accusation reeks of immaturity.

___________________

Last edited by pkcRAISTLIN on Apr-23-2009 at 05:50

quote:

Firstly, the CIA didn't create shit. They provided training, arms and $$ to mujahideen fighters during the soviet invasion.

They created the term Al Qaeda you moron, it is a CIA fabrication plain and simple. You ignored to watch this same video that was posted ages ago but if you would actually pay attention for once you might just learn something. It is really not hard to see why this documentary was aired in almost all countries but the never in the USA. I wonder why....


Top Ranking CIA Operatives Admit Al-qaeda Is a Complete Fabrication


BBC’s killer documentary called “The Power of Nightmares“. Top CIA officials openly admit, Al-qaeda is a total and complete fabrication, never having existed at any time. The Bush administration needed a reason that complied with the Laws so they could go after “the bad guy of their choice” namely laws that had been set in place to protect us from mobs and “criminal organizations” such as the Mafia. They paid Jamal al Fadl, hundreds of thousands of dollars to back the U.S. Government’s story of Al-qaeda, a “group” or criminal organization they could “legally” go after.

PART 1


PART 2


PART 3

The CIA's "Operation Cyclone" - Stirring The Hornet's Nest Of Islamic Unrest


Zbigniew Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorized $500 million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "de-stabilise" the Soviet Union...

The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4 billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student").

Young zealots were sent to the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda were taught "sabotage skills" - terrorism.

Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated Twin Towers.

In Pakistan, they were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the SAS.

The result, quipped Brzezinski, was "a few stirred up Muslims" - meaning the Taliban.

The Wall Street Journal declared: "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources."

No American newspaper dares suggest that the prisoners in Camp X-Ray are the product of this policy, nor that it was one of the factors that led to the attacks of September 11.

Nor do they ask: who were the real winners of September 11?

The day the Wall Street stock market opened after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the few companies showing increased value were the giant military contractors Alliant Tech Systems, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (a contributor to New Labor) and Lockheed Martin.

As the US military's biggest supplier, Lockheed Martin's share value rose by a staggering 30 per cent.

Within six weeks of September 11, the company (with its main plant in Texas, George Bush's home state) had secured the biggest military order in history: a $200 billion contract to develop a new fighter aircraft. The greatest taboo of all, which Orwell would surely recognize, is the record of the United States as a terrorist state and haven for terrorists.

This truth is virtually unknown by the American public and makes a mockery of Bush's (and Blair's) statements about "tracking down terrorists wherever they are."

They don't have to look far.

Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, has given refuge to terrorists who, like the September 11 gang, have hi-jacked aircraft and boats with guns and knives.

Most have never had criminal charges brought against them.

Why? All of them are anti-Castro Cubans. Former Guatemalan Defence Minister Gramajo Morales, who was accused of "devising and directing an indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians", including the torture of an American nun and the massacre of eight people from one family, studied at Harvard University on a US government scholarship.

During the 1980s, thousands of people were murdered by death squads connected to the army of El Salvador, whose former chief now lives comfortably in Florida.

The former Haitian dictator, General Prosper Avril, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television.

When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US government, and granted political asylum.

A leading member of the Chilean military during the reign of General Pinochet, whose special responsibility was executions and torture, lives in Miami.

THE Iranian general who ran Iran's notorious prisons, is a wealthy exile in the US.

One of Pol Pot's senior henchmen, who enticed Cambodian exiles back to their certain death, lives in Mount Vernon, New York.

What all these people have in common, apart from their history of terrorism, is that they either worked directly for the US government or carried out the dirty work of US policies.

The al-Qaeda training camps are kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, its graduates include almost half the cabinet ministers of the genocidal regimes in Guatemala, two thirds of the El Salvadoran army officers who committed, according to the United Nations, the worst atrocities of that country's civil war, and the head of Pinochet's secret police, who ran Chile's concentration camps.

There is terrible irony at work here. The humane response of people all over the world to the terrorism of September 11 has long been hijacked by those running a rapacious great power with a history of terrorism second to none. Global supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only the politically blind believe otherwise.


http://www.therant.org:2005/therant...arter_admi.html